Five tech principles to combat domestic abuse
IBM recently published five key design principles to help technologists prevent their products being used as a tactic of domestic abuse – leading the charge in creating awareness of a societal issue of our time, with a call to action to make technology inherently safer.
Overview
It is widely accepted that technology offers tremendous potential for good, epitomised by the key role it has played in helping humanity sustain community in a self-isolating, COVID-19 world. With technologists innovating ceaselessly, we are able to choose from an ever-growing range of products that improve our daily lives and cater for our needs. This is particularly evident in the home, where technology is used to safeguard us, ease our routines and enrich our experiences.
Unfortunately, even well-meaning applications and devices are being manipulated to cause real-world harm. Those same technologies that connect and protect us are being exploited by abusers to exert an unprecedented level of control over their victims.
Background
An IBM UK initiative has been looking into the impact of technology-facilitated abuse. They have seen that this tactic is prevalent in domestic abuse, particularly coercive control - a pattern of dominating behaviour aimed at instilling fear and compliance in a victim.
Domestic abuse is a widespread societal problem. In the United Kingdom and United States, 1 in 3 women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime while intimate partner violence is thought to be a reality for 65 percent of women in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. What is deeply worrying is that a recent UN report, exploring the impact of COVID-19 on women, highlighted a trend of increased abuse as homes are placed under strain from self-isolation. During the lockdown, UK charity Refuge reported that 66% more people were calling the national domestic abuse helpline and that there was a 950% increase in traffic to their website.
Refuge also found that nearly three-quarters of the people seeking their help last year had faced abuse via technology. In the past two years the charity has seen a rise in cases which involve abusers using IoT devices against their victims - such as smart locks and webcams. It is very possible that such cases are underreported because many victims are simply unaware of what is happening to them. In addition, an Australian survey of domestic abuse support workers found an almost complete overlap between technology-facilitated abuse and domestic abuse with 98% saying they had clients who had experienced abuse via technology.
The forms of technology-facilitated abuse are numerous but perhaps the most insidious is when applications designed with the best of intentions are used with malicious intent. Some examples are the connected doorbell, designed with safety in mind, being used to monitor and entrap victims and the credit card app, created to help combat fraud, being used to control and constantly monitor a partner’s spending.
Coercive control resistant design
Technology-facilitated abuse is a challenging issue, with no easy answer to ending it. However, by making subtle decisions - balancing intended with unintended consequences - it is possible to design technology to be resistant to it.
The Coercive Control Resistant Design paper, published by IBM, presents five design principles that will help create products that can resist malicious manipulation. By sharing this set of design principles, IBM aims to provide the tools and knowledge for improving the usability, security, and privacy of new technologies – making technology inherently safer.
Call to action
Few of us in the technical community intentionally create technology to cause harm, but it is possible that we are disconnected from the unintended effects of our creations. By building technology with an eye towards making it resistant to abuse, our creations will harness innovation while limiting unforeseen consequences - shaping lives and society for the better.
Read the IBM Policy Lab ‘Five Technology Principles to Combat Domestic Abuse’ article and download the paper to learn more.
Lesley Nuttall works in IBM Security, within Expert Labs. She works closely with customers from a range of industries, offering them technical guidance and advice.
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