Chapter 8: Intimate Femicide, Technology, and Domestic and Family Violence

Technologies are readily weaponised by perpetrators of domestic and family violence to harass, monitor, restrict, coerce, and control targets. Awareness of these practices is growing, but less explored is how digital coercive control can potentially signal risk of femicide (and filicide). Emphasis to date has been on certain technologies that are seen as threats (like ‘spyware’ that enables covert digital surveillance of a victim-survivor), or actions regarded as dangerous, like technology-facilitated stalking, or harmful, such as harassment, image-based abuse or hacking. However, key to detection and disruption of these harms is not identification of specific behaviours, but patterns of abuse, relational dynamics, and the intent of a perpetrator and impact (to entrap and control a victim-survivor).

Proposing a practical and theoretical framework to understand digital coercive control, this chapter explores opportunities to gain intel into digital ‘homicide flags’. This is not without challenges. Attention is given to how the role of technology in our lives; changing privacy practices, normalisation, and romanticisation of digital abuse; and perpetrator strategies to hide and minimise their activities complicate these efforts and myths about perpetrators of digital coercive control. Also examined are barriers to effective advocate and practitioner invention and victim-survivor support.

The role of technology in facilitating and fuelling misogynistic violence against women, and associations between misogynistic communities online and femicide are explored. In closing are discussions of opportunities to harness technology to detect, interrupt, and prevent femicide that warrant further attention.