jan 16, 2021 - Domestic Abusers Exploited Technology

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FROM TIME MAGAZINE:

How Domestic Abusers Have Exploited Technology During the Pandemic

BY MÉLISSA GODIN
DECEMBER 31, 2020

When Julie’s boyfriend came home with a brand new iPhone for her at the end of the summer in 2019, Julie saw it as a peace offering—a sign that their relationship was on the mend.

A few weeks earlier, her boyfriend Steve had flown into a rage, trashing the apartment they shared, punching Julie in the face and breaking her nose. He’d smashed her phone when she tried to call for help. But now, here he was with a replacement phone, and despite Steve’s past behavior, Julie convinced herself the gift was a sign things would be alright. (Julie asked TIME to use pseudonyms for her and Steve to protect her privacy.)

She was particularly impressed that her boyfriend of two months had set up the new phone with her favorite apps and was encouraging her to get out and see friends.

“I had never been allowed to go out and enjoy myself,” says Julie, a 21-year-old living in London. “I thought it was a change in our relationship.”

The euphoria didn’t last. Six months later, as COVID-19 sent the U.K. hurtling into a lockdown, Julie found herself in a nightmare shared by untold numbers of domestic violence victims: trapped with an abuser who was exploiting the pandemic and using technology to control her every movement.

Abusers have long used tech to spy on victims, but the pandemic has given them greater opportunities than ever before. It’s much easier to get access to a partner’s phone to alter privacy settings, obtain passwords, or install tracking software when people are spending so much time together in close proximity. For couples not in lockdown together, abusers may feel a greater need to track their partners. Survivors have also reported that their abusers are surveilling them in an attempt to gather evidence of them breaking lockdown rules and using it against them.

Compounding the problem: it’s much harder for targets of abuse to escape as the fear of infection discourages them from moving in with relatives and friends or fleeing to shelters. And in-person counseling and other programs that serve people in abusive relationships who need help have been curtailed.

The problem of tech abuse pre-dates the pandemic, though data is limited. The U.K.-based organization Refuge, which assists domestic violence survivors, said in 2019 that around 95% of its cases involved some form of tech abuse ranging from tracking a partner’s location using Google Maps to downloading stalkerware and spyware apps on phones. In 2019, the U.S.-based National Network to End Domestic Violence found that 71% of domestic abusers monitor survivors’ device activities: 54% downloaded stalkerware onto their partners’ devices. A study published by the Journal of Family Violence in January 2020 found that 60–63% of survivors receiving services from domestic violence programs reported tech-based abuse.

Experts say that the pandemic has likely made the problem worse. In July, the antivirus company Avast said that after COVID-19 placed people around the world in lockdown, rates of spyware and stalkerware detection skyrocketed, increasing by 51% globally within a month of lockdowns being implemented in March. In June, the antivirus company Malwarebytes found that there was a 780% increase in the detection of monitoring apps and a 1677% increase in the detection of spyware since January. While anti-virus companies expected to see a small rise in the number of detected spyware apps due to improvements in their detection technology, the dramatic increase during lockdown was a red flag to them that abuse was increasing.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that anti-virus companies have good reason to warn that tech abuse is on the rise—it lets them portray themselves as solutions to a dangerous problem. “Having said that, this doesn’t mean stalkerware isn’t an increasing problem,” she says, “and that they aren’t the solution.” Domestic violence organizations have reported an increase in the number of reported tech abuse cases since the pandemic began in March, corroborating the findings of antivirus companies. Some survivors have reported stealth surveillance while others have been forced to share their locations with their abusers 24/7. Refuge reports that 40% of the 2,513 tech-abuse survivors who have sought their services since the pandemic began had also experienced sexual violence and 47% had been subject to death threats

“In lockdown, many of the women we supported were living with perpetrators of abuse, and we received countless reports of tech threats,” says Jane Keeper, the director of operations at Refuge.

[Long Article continued via the links below]

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