EXTERNALLY FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Building responses to technology-facilitated violence
Background
This project aims to investigate one of Australia’s most pressing social problems: domestic violence and the emerging use of digital technology to enact and escalate abuse and stalking. Technology-facilitated domestic violence threatens psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing and safety (and signifies risk of homicide), and so warrants attention. Justice systems can have a crucial role in preventing technology-facilitated violence and safeguarding and empowering victims and survivors. This timely project seeks to assess existing state responses to and regulation of such harms, but also considers other responses and solutions, including abolitionist perspectives and proposals. It expects to provide an evidence base to enhance and develop innovative policy and practice, with benefits to communities and economies.
Aim
This project aims to provide a critical evidence base to inform and enhance responses to technology-facilitated domestic and family violence.
Methods
This mixed method project has a large dataset involving consultation with the domestic and family violence, legal and technology sectors, internationally; engagement with victims and survivors and persons who have perpetrated abuse in Australia; and surveys of and interviews with police and judicial officers in numerous Australian states. Urban and non-urban (regional, rural and remote) jurisdictions are selected to showcase the impact of place and space on experiences of and responses to technology-facilitated domestic and family violence.
Significance
This project will contribute to:- empowering victims and survivors by providing strategies to support women's safe use of technology (serving to strengthen victim and survivor access to digital channels to seek support, assistance and information and formal and informal responses to domestic and family violence)
- informing enhanced risk assessment procedures (which can potentially reduce incidences of domestic and family violence, intimate partner homicide, and the social and economic costs of domestic and family violence, and greater identification of high-risk offenders)
- facilitating access to justice, by developing recommendations to achieve greater uniformity in police and court responses (which can aid in addressing inconsistencies in collection and admissibility of evidence of technology-facilitated domestic and family violence, regulation of digital breaches of intervention orders, combating "postcode justice" [spatial variances in the justice systems] and bolstering perceptions of procedural justice and confidence in the justice system)
- guiding an evidence base to capacity-build criminal justice agencies, by identifying areas to address in police and judicial training (building police and judicial confidence and effectiveness of investigation and regulation processes).