Technology-facilitated abuse featured in two in five intimate partner homicides in the United Kingdom, according to an analysis of statutory death reviews published by The Observer on Tuesday.
The newspaper examined every report on an intimate partner killing in the government’s Domestic Homicide Review Library up to April. The library records 647 deaths between 2004 and 2022, of which intimate partner cases account for 75 per cent, or 487 reports. In 85 per cent of those the victim was a woman and the perpetrator a man.
Domestic Homicide Reviews are statutory multi-agency reviews, carried out when the death of a person over 16 is thought to have resulted from domestic abuse. They are conducted with the participation of the agencies involved, which makes them a different kind of record from survey data or press reports.
Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner, was quoted as saying the analysis showed the “devastating consequences” of technology abuse and called for stronger responses from police and public services. She said she hears “daily” from survivors who report it and are told by police to “simply stop using it, change the password, or block their perpetrator”.
“As technology evolves, so do abusers’ tactics. Right now our current risk indicator tools, used by the police and other public services to safeguard victims, are not keeping up with the danger of this abuse.”
What was found
The Observer identified four methods of technology-facilitated abuse, and a fifth category in which perpetrators restricted a victim’s access to technology. It reports that many cases featured more than one form. Its findings, in its own terms:
- Harassment — using technology to bombard victims with communication, send threatening messages, and distribute intimate images without consent — was “the most common category, found in 58% of cases”
- Monitoring — overtly controlling a victim’s use of devices, or checking their messages — “featured in 40% of all cases”
- Surveillance — covert use of technology to track or record — “featured in a third”
- Deception — creating fake accounts, or falsifying messages or evidence — “was present in 15% of cases”
- Restricting access to technology — destroying devices, changing passwords to lock victims out of accounts, preventing them calling for help — in “44% of cases”
In five cases, the analysis found technology was used to facilitate or conceal the killing itself: perpetrators falsified messages from victims after their deaths, or used surveillance technology to locate them beforehand.
Not recorded as a risk
The finding the analysis returns to is what happened when victims reported it.
In the case of Alice Ruggles, murdered in Gateshead in 2016 after a campaign of stalking that included her social media being hacked, police advised her to block the perpetrator, turn off her phone and delete her social media accounts. No technology-facilitated abuse was taken into account in the risk assessments carried out into her safety.
In a Dorset case from 2021, in which the review gave the victim and perpetrator the pseudonyms Daisy and Robert, there was no documented physical violence between them. She reported his messages to police one lunchtime and was asked to confirm that she had told him to stop and had blocked his number. Her report was placed in a queue. No officer had attended when, 23 hours later, he entered her home and killed her.
What the specialists said
Emma Pickering, head of technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment at the charity Refuge, said the findings were likely “the tip of the iceberg”, and that officers “can be slow or reluctant to obtain evidence directly from perpetrators’ devices”. Police forces, she said, need to be resourced “to investigate tech-facilitated crime and secure digital evidence in a timely and effective manner”.
Refuge research in 2021 found that one in three women in the UK had experienced online abuse, one in six of them at the hands of a partner or former partner — which the charity puts at almost two million women. Its own client figures show a 258 per cent rise in technology-facilitated abuse between 2018 and 2022. Pickering said Refuge has since seen a rise in reports involving wearable technology, hidden cameras and microphones.
Jen Reed, head of policy at University College London’s gender and tech research lab, said the findings showed technology had “transformed the way perpetrators commit abuse”. Such abuse is “increasingly normalised, with many people not recognising this form of abuse early enough”, she said, and survivors who seek help “are not always taken as seriously as they may be for other forms of abuse”.
The data stops in 2022
The most recent death in the published reviews occurred in 2022. Pickering noted that technology has moved on since, “including the unregulated development of AI”.
The analysis therefore predates the period in which AI-generated sexual imagery became widely available — and predates every development this publication has reported this month.
Six days earlier, a scoping review published in PLOS One had found that evidence on escalation from online abuse to offline violence “remains extremely limited”, identifying a single study tracing that progression among the research it examined for sub-Saharan Africa. The two documents measure different things in different places. Read together, they suggest the evidence base is thin because few have looked.