Big tech, address violence against women and girls

Historically, our discussions of domestic, family and sexual violence have mainly focused on the physical: bruises, scars and broken bones.

But thanks to the courageous voices of victim-survivors we’ve come to appreciate abusers don’t just employ tactics of physical violence. They also wage a psychological and emotional campaign. And technology plays an increasing role.

While gender-based violence is a social harm deeply rooted in many cultures, technology and digital devices have enabled misogyny, abuse and violence to flourish in ways we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago.

Mobile phones, smart home devices and wearables have become ubiquitous and increasingly central to the way we all live and work. We rely on them, yet they’re also the modern-day weapons of perpetrators. As vessels for covert and overt tracking, surveillance, manipulation and gas-lighting, they’re akin to tentacles picking at and eroding the psychological safety of victim-survivors and their children.

In the words of one victim-survivor: “Technology tethered me to my abuser.”

These patterns of technology-facilitated abuse reveal a sobering truth: too many technology design choices disregard the safety and human rights of women, girls and diverse communities. Whether it be wilful or ignorant, such blindness is unacceptable. Not when the scale of harm and violence is so great.

We urgently need Big Tech to come to grips with how tech-facilitated gender-based violence is playing out across devices, platforms and services - from perpetration and prevalence to typology.

It’s time for these powerful companies to ‘get real' and accept technology is not only a benign force. It’s one actively used in malign and creative ways against a critical mass of users who are forced (sometimes daily) to wade through well-worn misogynistic tropes, sexual violence and threats to personal safety.

From today, there’s no excuse for industry not to improve. eSafety has launched a world-first paper on tech-facilitated gender-based violence and Safety by Design, which surfaces up best-practice for replication across industry. Many of these are women-led, necessitated by the creators' own lived experience of online gendered violence. By applying a gendered lens to Safety by Design, companies would examine every feature and design aspect to minimise risks for women and girls at the design phase, engineering out potential misuse before launch.

If my plea is not persuasive enough, I urge the online and technology sector to hear, and heed, the voices of victim-survivors. Their stories powerfully illuminate the many and varied facets of violence, and the role technology plays in it. The resulting trauma is life-changing for those who experience it and reverberates across families and communities the world over.

Big Tech, please, learn from these stories and harness their wisdom and insights. In doing so, you’ll be better protecting not just today’s users – but those of future generations.