Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse: International Perspectives and Experiences

While digital technologies have led to many important social and cultural advances worldwide, they also facilitate the perpetration of violence, abuse and harassment, known as technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA). TFVA includes a spectrum of behaviors perpetrated online, of ﬂ ine, and through a range of technologies, including arti ﬁ cial intelligence, live-streaming, GPS tracking, and social media. This chapter provides an overview of TFVA, including a brief snapshot of existing quantitative and qualitative research relating to various forms of TFVA. It then discusses the aims and contributions of this book as a whole, before outlining ﬁ ve overarching themes arising from the contributions. The chapter concludes by mapping out the structure of the book.

There are numerous examples of TFVA. These include (but are not limited to) technology-facilitated sexual assault (the use of digital devices or apps to facilitate in-person sexual assault); image-based sexual abuse (the nonconsensual taking, sharing, or threats to share intimate images); cyberstalking (surveillance, monitoring, repeated contact, and impersonation); unwelcome requests and sexual solicitation; image-based harassment (the sending of unwanted and unsolicited explicit images); hate speech; threats of rape and violence; restricting access to and use of technology for purposes of isolation and coercion; exposure to violent and abusive imagery (whether sexual or nonsexual); the creation, distribution, and possession of child sexual exploitation materials; cyberbullying; and the nonconsensual disclosure of personal information, also known as "doxxing." TFVA is carried out through text, images, and unwanted digitally-enabled or enhanced surveillance and monitoring, using a variety of devices and platforms from basic digital tools, such as texting, email, and social media, to more advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) (Flynn, 2019;, GPS tracking (Wong, 2019), and drones (Thomasen, 2018).
TFVA arises in both public and private contexts across a spectrum of human relationships between strangers, acquaintances, friends, family members, and intimate partners (Citron, 2014). While a broad spectrum of people have experienced TFVA across different categories of age, sex, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, or socioeconomic status, TFVA is not simply a collection of random acts of hostility and animosity. It is a product of existing intersecting layers of structural and systemic inequalities (Southern & Harmer, 2019), such as misogyny , homophobia (Green, 2019), transphobia (Colliver, Coyle, & Silvestri, 2019), racism (Kerrigan, 2019), colonialism (Carlson, 2019), and ableism (Hall, 2019), with some forms disproportionately affecting children and young people Quayle & Koukopoulos, 2018). Further, in the digital environment, corporate structuring and monitoring practices for the purposes of maximizing profit contribute to and shape TFVA, its proliferation, and its impacts (Dragiewicz et al., 2018).
This introduction provides an overview of existing quantitative and qualitative research relating to various forms of TFVA. It then discusses the aims and contributions of this Handbook, highlighting the breadth of the research included, before proceeding to focus on five overarching themes arising from these collected works. Finally, it maps out the sections within the book, each of which is preceded in the Handbook by its own introductory remarks.

Research on Responses to TFVA
Often the empirical literature on TFVA also includes recommendations as to how best to respond to TFVA (see, e.g., Bailey, 2015;Harris, 2020;Powell et al., 2020). There is also, however, a significant literature focused primarily on proposing and/or analyzing the efficacy of one or more responses, including legal (criminal, civil, human rights, and regulatory), technological, and educational approaches, as well as improved support for TFVA targets and self-help initiatives undertaken by targets themselves.

This Handbook
We imagined this collection as one that would contribute to the existing landscape in part by breaking away from geographic, sectoral, and disciplinary silos. To achieve this, we have brought together the work of a diverse range of contributors from 13 countries (Australia, Brasil, Canada, Eswatini, Finland, Hong Kong, Malawi, Malta, New Zealand, Nigeria, Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and seven different sectors (academia, ICT, nonprofit, consulting, policy, regulatory, and legal practice). Our academic contributions come from scholars in 11 different fields (communications/media studies; law; sociology; health; education; political studies; justice/criminology; behavioral studies; social, global, and cultural studies; digital ethics; and science and engineering), some of whom collaborated with contributors from different areas in the nonprofit sector (women's rights/gender equality, public health, development, privacy rights, and domestic violence). Our contributors report on research drawing on the lived experiences of TFVA targets in places around the globe from a wide range of social locations affected by categories such as gender, gender identity, age, sexual identity, race, and indigeneity, as well as from the on-the-ground advocates and community organizations that support them. They also present insights from academics and policy organizations actively engaged in developing meaningful responses for preventing and/or remedying the harms they inflict, as well as firsthand perspectives from TFVA perpetrators.
Our aim in bringing together this international, intersectoral, intersectional, and interdisciplinary group of contributors, whose work covers a wide spectrum of forms of TFVA, is to produce synergies that reinvigorate discussions of TFVA, encouraging opportunities for future collaboration, as well as insights from one area that could be applied to others. We also hope that in showcasing a range of legal, empirical, and theoretical research focused on the targets, support services, and perpetrators of TFVA, across a diverse range of social locations, as well as multiple strategies for addressing TFVA, this collection can contribute toward nuanced understandings of this complex phenomenon that can open up opportunities for developing meaningful multifaceted responses grounded in recognition of TFVA as both a product and producer of intersecting systems of power.

Research Contributions of this Handbook
This Handbook's empirical contributions include qualitative analyses of: (1) Interviews and/or focus groups with: • Men who have sex with men, and their understandings of "rape culture" on Grindr (Dietzel); • Brasilian and Australian advocates working on technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse among youth (Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira); • Canadian women who have experienced online abuse (Gosse); Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse 5 • Women in remote, regional, and rural areas of Australia who have experienced digital coercive control  (3) International law instruments applicable to TFVA, particularly genderbased TFVA (Coombs); (4) International and Arab region legal responses to gender-based TFVA (Al Nasrawi); (5) Legal responses to image-based sexual abuse in Malawi and Scotland (Chisala-Templehoff & Stevenson); (6) Judicial approaches to prosecution of (ex) intimate partners for nonconsensual distribution of intimate images in Canadian criminal law proceedings (Aikenhead); (7) Legal approaches to privacy in the context of TFVA (

Five Key Insights from this Handbook
While this collection yields a myriad of insights and possibilities for future engagement, below we highlight five overarching themes interwoven within this diverse group of contributions: (i) the importance of context; (ii) the need to define and redefine understandings of "violence"; (iii) the power of words and images; (iv) the need to think systemically; and (v) the need to employ a spectrum of legal responses that move beyond criminal law, as well as approaches beyond law altogether. Here we highlight aspects of each of these, leaving more detailed analyses of the content of each chapter for the introductions that precede each section of the collection.

The Importance of Context
The importance of taking context into account in order to better understand and respond to TFVA emerges from this collection in three main ways. The first relates to the critical role that contextuality plays in social science research focused on TFVA. For example, the chapters of Edgar Pacheco and Neil Melhuish, Olusean Makinde et al., and Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira, underscore the importance of supplementing quantitative findings with in-depth qualitative analyses in order to better understand and represent lived perspectives. These chapters raise questions about why those who perpetrate and experience behaviors often associated with TFVA fail to categorize them as forms of violence and abuse. There may be a variety of reasons to explain such quantitative findings. Perhaps survey respondents are uninformed or they are immersed in environments where violence is normalized. On the other hand, particular sorts of behavior (e.g., repeatedly texting someone during the day) could be part of otherwise harmless or even consensual practices. In these kinds of cases, supplemental qualitative research will often be a useful tool for better understanding the context in which listed behaviors are occurring, and concomitantly how to identify and meaningfully address those that are problematic. Further, as Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer point out, perspectives about "what counts" as a form of TFVA can be intimately interconnected with culture, thereby undermining the explanatory power of quantitative research based on standardized definitions with members of mainstream groups.
Second, context can and arguably should play a critical role in developing legal responses to TFVA. Anne Cheung's chapter, for example, illustrates the importance of sociopolitical context in differentiating legal responses to nonconsensually disclosing personal information about others online (doxxing) for the purposes of calling public authorities to account from doxxing for other motivations, such as sexual shaming and humiliation. Cheung's particular approach to doxxing in the Hong Kong context is consistent with Bree Anderson and Mark Wood's more general conclusion that doxxing should be understood as a typology of "interconnected motivations, expressions and experiences of harm." Seonaid Stevenson-McCabe's and Sarai Chisala-Templehoff's chapter emphasizes the role that context plays in determining whether a legal solution from one jurisdiction is likely to be workable in another. Kristen Thomasen's and Suzie Dunn's chapter centers the role of equality considerations in the legal interpretation and application of privacy principles, especially in cases involving the nonconsensual disclosure of intimate images, a form of privacy violation with particular consequences for women and members of LGBTQI1 communities that arise primarily from preexisting prejudices such as misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Third, the chapters by Elena Cama, Chris Dietzel, and Moira Aikenhead remind us of the impact of preexisting rape cultures on understandings of and responses to TFVA. Cama and Dietzel's chapters connect sexually violent forms of TFVA on dating apps with pervasive myths and stereotypes about sexuality and gender that serve to normalize and excuse sexual violence harms. Similarly, Aikenhead's analysis of so-called "revenge porn" cases prosecuted under Canada's criminal prohibition on the nondisclosure of intimate images reveals the way that rape culture myths around women's sexuality lead to blaming targets for their own victimization and consequently manifest themselves in fact and in law.

Defining and Redefining "Violence"
Several chapters in the collection underscore the importance of grappling with preexisting conceptions of "violence" in order to understand how nonphysical technology-facilitated behaviors can and should be understood as "violence." Suzie Dunn's chapter emphasizes the role that conceptualizing TFVA as violence can play in communicating its social unacceptability (even with respect to actions that do not rise to the level of being illegal). Chandel Gosse's chapter further illustrates the complex ways in which the "online/offline" dichotomy works to minimize TFVA and in burdening TFVA targets to prove that the harms are "real." The chapters by Walter DeKeseredy, Danielle Stoneberg, and Gabrielle Lory, Bridget Harris and Delanie Woodlock, and Laura Vitis further challenge this false dichotomy by demonstrating the ways that TFVA can both emanate from and bleed into harmful physical interactions.

The Power of Words and Images
In digitally networked environments, words and images have power, yet false dichotomies, such as online/offline and real/virtual, work to obscure the real impacts of TFVA. The chapters by Kim Barker and Olga Jurasz (on the need for a legal response to online verbal assaults), Bridget Harris and Delanie Woodlock (on remote, regional, and rural women's experiences of digital coercive control), Emma Jane (on lateral violence between women in online spaces), and Laura Vitis (on TFVA in the context of intimate partner violence) highlight in particular the power of words as tools for exerting control over others in ways that undermine targets' dignity, security, and sense of self-worth, as well as their willingness to participate in public life. Ben Colliver (on anti-trans online discourse) and Elina Vaahensalo (on online othering) graphically illustrate in their chapters how words and discursive strategies are used as tools for re/making an "other" in an attempt to justify (or at least rationalize) violence and abuse.
In terms of the power of images, Olga Marques' chapter emphasizes the dignity and privacy harms arising from intimate images being circulated without consent because the images become a form of permanent remembering that freezes understandings and perceptions of the target at a particular point in time, not of their choosing. The chapters of Samantha Keene, and Madeleine Novich and Alyssa Zduniak highlight the differential effects of, respectively, sexually violent mainstream pornographic images and images of acts of police brutality on online spectators from different social locations, again revealing the power of images to cause harm.

Thinking Systemically: Corporations, the Role of the State, and Intersectionality
This collection also highlights the need to rethink individuated understandings of TFVA in favor of analyses that seek to understand and address TFVA as both a product and reflection of corporate, state, and discriminatory social systems. As the chapters of Nicola Henry and Alice Witt, and Michael Salter and Elly Hanson demonstrate, TFVA is perpetuated not just by "bad individuals," but also by the systems and practices of the technology companies that structure and facilitate online interactions. Ari Waldman's chapter builds upon these insights, highlighting the ways in which these structures can undermine gay and bisexual male dating app users' self-help strategies for avoiding TFVA by compromising their ability to maintain greater privacy. Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer's chapter demonstrates the harm done by research approaches that attempt to "standardize" conceptions such as "cyberbullying," noting the ways in which such homogenization fails to account for the lived realities of Indigenous peoples, whose experiences are shaped both by cultural traditions, as well as by oftenintersecting "social forms of hate," including sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Jane Bailey and Sara Shayan's chapter reveals another outcome of taking a more systemic approach to TFVA. They highlight examples of both individual and state-based acts of TFVA targeting Indigenous peoples in Canada (with a particular focus on Indigenous women and girls), noting their intersecting colonialist, racist, and sexist underpinnings. Drawing on critical Indigenous scholarship, they argue Indigenous peoples are likely to have wellplaced mistrust in colonial state-based responses to TFVA given the state's own involvement in perpetrating such acts.

Moving Beyond Law (Especially Criminal Law)
While a number of contributors call for improved laws for combatting TFVA, the theme of moving beyond law arises in two key ways. First, contributions such as those of Pam Hrick (focusing on administrative and regulatory bodies) and those by Elizabeth Coombs and Sukaina Al-Nasrawi (focusing on international human rights norms), while maintaining a focus on legal responses, help us to understand the roles that legal responses other than criminal law can play. Second, several contributions move beyond law completely to focus on technology-driven prevention of and responses to TFVA. Moving beyond state-based legal responses to TFVA is likely to be of particular relevance and import to members of marginalized communities that are disparately likely to be targeted by many forms of state violence (Palmater, 2016). While the chapters of Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira, Yee Man Louie, and Bridget Harris and Delanie Woodlock, highlight the particularly useful role that technological responses may play in serving isolated and socially marginalized targets of IPV, Alison Marganski and Lisa Melander, Eva PenzeyMoog and Danielle Slakoff, and Julia Slupska and Leonie Tanczer grapple with challenges and solutions for grounding technological design in targets' lived experiences. Finally, Ella Broadbent and Chrissy Thompson (counter-hegemonic tweets), Robert Lytle, Tabrina Bratton, and Heather Hudson (bystander intervention), Salter and Hanson (online self-help initiatives of child sexual exploitation survivors), and Jane Bailey and Raine Liliefeldt (multisector collaboration) focus on individual and collective strategies that can, in some instances, be understood as self-help strategies for seeking justice when formal legal channels are undesired, unavailable, and/or ineffective.
As discussed further in our Conclusion, the significance of bringing together diverse insights, experiences, and strategies for addressing TFVA and the underlying systemic drivers that inform it, have taken on renewed significance since we began this collection in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic and the global outpouring of protests against highly publicized instances of anti-Black and other forms of racist violence and discrimination serve to remind us of the complex entanglements between our common humanity and the deep social, political, economic, technological, and geographic divisions between us. We hope that the collection of ideas and analyses presented here will contribute toward imagining a way forward.
The collection begins with contributions examining TFVA across a spectrum of behaviors. It then focuses more specifically on text-based harms before proceeding to image-based harms. Next, it considers TFVA in the relational contexts of dating apps and IPV. The final two sections focus on responses, beginning with legal approaches and ending with responses that move beyond law.