Abusive Partner Perspectives on Technology Abuse: Implications for Community-based Violence Prevention

DOI

Stereotypes about abusive partners who abuse technology can hinder socio-technical interventions for groups subject to digital-safety risks -- such as survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). In this study, we first offer a comparative analysis of seven research projects on how 152 abusive partners (APs) of IPV talk about, and make sense of, their malicious uses of technology in-person. To ground our discoveries in immediate practical benefit for practitioner communities, we first introduce the challenges reported by 20 APIP facilitators to investigate potential avenues to address technology abuse in their programming. While expressing a keen interest to address technology abuse in their work, professionals expressed concern over a lack of information, risky attempts to establish ground truth, a fear of teaching APs new abusive techniques, and a lack of appropriate approaches to de-normalizing problematic technology use. Paired with this information, our analysis of AP accounts highlight three important factors that are most often obscured from general descriptions of tech abuse; namely, awareness, justifications, and strategies for desistance. We conclude with targeted, practical steps forward for the wider CSCW community and for professional stakeholders in violence prevention work.