Consent, Coercive Control and Technologically-facilitated abuse: Co-building policy and digital toolkits for the elimination on digital violence against women and girls

Project team

Adrienne Evans
Lindsay Balfour

Funder

ESRC Impact Acceleration Account

Duration 

01/09/2023-30/06/2024

Project overview

This project has produced a digital toolkit co-design, built to enhance digital literacy and influence public pedagogy and policy around consent and coercive control in gender-based technology-facilitated abuse, including intimate surveillance (e.g. GPS, self-tracking technology). We have established an expert working group to enhance cross-sector collaboration. These activities follow the co-produced research and report Postdigital Intimacies for Online Safety (Balfour, Evans et al. 2023) that highlighted the need for digital intimacies literacy, and additional cross-sector work between stakeholders. Our co-design participants included representatives from Chayn, WalkSafe, Revenge Porn Helpline, Suzy Lamplugh Trust, Refuge, Women in Data, MSI Reproductive, Thrive Agency, and with feedback and discussion from the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and others. The outcomes include a prototype digital toolkit for victim-survivors and a report on the affordances and future developments of the toolkit.

Project objectives

Our aims are to:

• Increase cross-sector work on coercive control and consent towards policy recommendations and public awareness
• Introduce a digital toolkit for users and service providers
  These will be achieved through:
•  A workshops series, to allow a cross-sector working group to share research and build activities, and generate an open-access digital toolkit including curriculum downloads, training modules, safe app checklists etc.
• Harness government relationships initiated by our Postdigital Intimacies for Online Safety project to influence secondary legislation on technological abuse
• Wider publicity, including white paper/rapid review on research and activities.

Impact statement

Many practitioners, researchers, and experts agree that technology facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is increasing globally and pervasive, even while many of the highest figures still likely underestimate the true prevalence given that TFGBV is likely to be massively underreported (The Global Partnership, 2023), and in some cases may be difficult to know when it is happening.

Such prevalence creates a significant challenge to women’s human rights, equal participation in society, and the ability to live a life free from fear or threat. UN Women (2022) identify that online violence against women and girls (VAWG) can be as harmful as offline VAWG, “with serious impacts on health and wellbeing as well as serious economic, social and political impacts”.

The societal impact of this project lies in its capacity to address a gap in offering a toolkit that connects a wide range of material that provides support and directs people to the most relevant information for their situation.

Outputs

Divisar Un Futuro Juntas. Encuentro de organizaciones que trabajan por la violencia de género digital. Presentation of the project at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 17th April 2024.

Toolkit prototype (currently embargoed)

Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence: A Toolkit for Change. Report – forthcoming.