Overview
Digital technologies can give perpetrators of intimate partner abuse new ways to monitor, locate, and contact survivors, including through smartphones, cloud accounts, location sharing, and smart-home systems. Frontline domestic abuse workers increasingly need to consider these risks when helping survivors plan for their safety, but often lack access to specialist technical knowledge.
This project will develop a tool to help practitioners map a survivor’s digital exposure and work through appropriate responses. It will bring together technical, legal, and safeguarding knowledge, helping practitioners identify possible routes of access, consider how and when to secure accounts and devices, and recognise when specialist support is needed. The tool is designed to support practitioners’ judgement. It will be developed and tested with domestic abuse services and lived-experience advisers.
Project leads:
Hannah Pankow, Department of Computer Science and Technology
Alice Hutchings, Department of Computer Science and Technology
