Technology-facilitated coercive control: response, redress, risk, and reform

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article examines the deepening crisis in the treatment of women and girls by the legal/criminal justice system – as the legal and policy architecture that has long failed to deliver equal access to justice for victims of gender-based violence is confronted with new and altered forms of perpetration. Cautioning against a singular reliance on the law to prevent and respond to technology-facilitated coercive control, the authors contend that piecemeal law reform diverts much needed attention from the broader social and legal reforms needed to ensure equal and safe access to justice for victim-survivors of all forms of gender-based violence, including those forms perpetrated via technology. Through case and legislative analyses, the authors note that efforts to redress the harms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence must be alert to the risks of reactive legislation, discrimination, net-widening and overcriminalisation, victim blaming, systems abuse, and, in some cases, a further loss of autonomy, legal agency, and personhood for victim-survivors. The article concludes by arguing for a dismantling of the structural violence that pervades both the field of digital technology and the criminal justice sector, to avert the continued development, application, and weaponization of new technologies as instruments of misogynist abuse.