New tools, old abuse: Technology-Enabled Coercive Control (TECC)

Abstract

This paper examines how domestic violence abusers utilize digital technologies to extend their spatial and temporal control over survivors. By highlighting how digital technologies have become central tools for abusers to threaten, stalk, harass and surveil their partners, we situate technology-enabled coercive control as a continuation of harm perpetrated by domestic violence abusers, rather than a new or distinct form of abuse. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Seattle with survivors, advocates, law enforcement officers and prosecutors, we show how digital technologies enable abusers to more efficiently and effectively coercively control survivors anywhere and at any time, including after the relationship has ended. This paper contributes to geographic scholarship analyzing the role of digital technologies in policing and surveillance and advances this literature through a feminist geographic analytic that offers an embodied accounting of the way digital technologies regulate, discipline and govern at the scale of the body and within intimate relationships.