Archives

What is tech abuse and how can we tackle it?

Drs Leonie Tanczer and Madeleine Janickyj of the University College London (UCL) Gender and Tech Research Lab and the VISION research consortium, developed a policy briefing, What is tech abuse and how can we tackle it?, with their colleagues at the Gender and Tech Research Lab and the UCL Policy Impact Unit.

Technology-facilitated abuse (tech abuse) refers to the deliberate (mis)use or repurposing of digital systems to coerce, harass, or abuse others. While it is most commonly associated with domestic abuse and stalking, it also occurs in professional and institutional contexts, as well as from strangers.

It is a widespread problem: in the UK, 1.4 million women experienced domestic abuse in 2023-24. In abusive intimate relationships, tech abuse can extend and intensify existing patterns of coercive control, leading to greater levels of harm. Abusers may, for example, send persistent, obscene, or threatening digital communications or track a partner’s movements via GPS or app surveillance. They may also restrict access to accounts, services, or finances.

Despite a shared understanding of tech abuse across sectors and stakeholders, a consensus remains lacking on its precise definition and scope. This definitional ambiguity hinders efforts to measure its prevalence and impact, ultimately limiting how effective prevention and intervention strategies can be.

Recommendations

Tackling tech abuse requires a whole systems approach and better measurement. Other recommendations include:

  • Enforce safety-by-design principles and mandatory abusability testing for technology products to proactively address potential misuse
  • Deepen understanding of perpetrator behaviour and motivations to inform prevention and intervention strategies
  • Leverage innovative methods, such as machine learning, to better understand and respond to tech abuse
  • Improve coordinated responses from police, frontline domestic abuse services, tech companies, and government/international bodies, backed by sufficient and sustainable funding
  • Future-proof policies and regulations, clarify responsibility, and determine accountability across different stakeholders
  • Stop the normalisation of Tech Abuse to support more victims/survivors to seek help, including through honest conversations around digital consent

To download: What is Tech Abuse and how can we tackle it?

To cite: Janickyj, M., Koukopoulos, N., Polamarasetty, A., Reed, J., & Tanczer, L. M. (2025). Policy Brief: What is Tech Abuse and how can we tackle it? Gender and Tech Research Lab, University College London.

For further information, please contact Maddy at m.janickyj@ucl.ac.uk

Illustration from Adobe Stock subscription

Insecure migration status increases risk of multiple forms of violence

Insecure migration status is defined as any person who does not have a long term secure immigration status and might fear removal from the country if they fail to comply with their visa restrictions, even if the failure to comply is unknown to them, if forced due to fear for their physical safety, or is coerced.

Research produced by Drs Alexandria Innes and Hannah Manzur of the VISION consortium and PhD student Jana Kriechbaum, Violence and Society Centre at City St George’s University of London, found that people in insecure migration status face or fear violence where violence prevention efforts and violence protection are either not extended to them, or are not made accessible to them.

Findings from their VISION Policy Briefing

The prevalence of violence against people in insecure migration status is a cause for concern. Prevalence of violence is not meaningfully different for people based on type of insecure status, such as those with undocumented status, asylum seekers and refugees, or employer-dependent visas.

Women on spousal visas connect experiences of domestic violence to insecurities associated with their immigration status. The power imbalance embedded in relationships that involve one citizen and one foreigner is exacerbated by attaching the relationship to dependent visa restrictions. Women on spousal visas associated their inability or unwillingness to leave a violent homelife with a fear of immigration removal, therefore prolonging their exposure to violence.

Recommendations

  1. Decouple immigration enforcement from violence prosecution and victim support
  2. Expand protections for survivors of domestic violence
  3. Strengthen protections for victims of work-related exploitation and improve employer regulations
  4. Address state violence in detention and border contexts
  5. Align immigration policies with public health frameworks

To download the VISION Policy Briefing: Insecure Migration

To cite: Innes, Alexandria; Manzur, Hannah; Kriechbaum, Jana (2025). VISION Policy Briefing: Insecure Migration. City, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.29860142.v1

For further information, please contact Andri at Alexandria.Innes@citystgeorges.ac.uk

Measuring the effectiveness of UK support services and interventions for domestic and sexual violence and abuse

Developing effective responses to domestic and sexual violence and abuse (DVSA) is critical. In the UK there are many support interventions and services, primarily provided by the third sector. Previous systematic reviews of the global evidence have found benefits of such interventions on a range of outcomes.

Despite this, there is limited understanding of which exact outcomes and outcome measures are currently being used both within and across DSVA support services and interventions in the UK specifically. Further, existing systematic reviews only focus on a single type of intervention or service, prohibiting comparisons across service types. Many also have only included evidence published in academic journals, potentially limiting and biasing findings.

For their VISION Policy Briefing, Drs Annie Bunce and Sophie Carlisle, carried out two evidence syntheses:

  1. A scoping review to identify, group and explore outcome measures that have been used to assess the effectiveness of UK-based DSVA support interventions or services.
  2. A systematic review to assess the effectiveness of these interventions or services in terms of the most commonly reported outcomes identified in the scoping review.

Findings include:

  1. Outcome measures assessing the effectiveness of support interventions and services are varied and inconsistent.
  2. Where consistent measures have been used, meta-analyses demonstrate potential benefits of UK-based advocacy and outreach services, psychological support interventions, and perpetrator programmes.
  3. Studies and evaluations assessing the effectiveness of support interventions and services are often methodologically flawed.
  4. Conflicting demands and lack of sufficient funding make robust testing and evaluation difficult in the third sector, reflecting a circular challenge.
  5. There was a lack of evidence for certain types of services and interventions (e.g. specialist sexual violence services/Independent Sexual Violence Advisers [ISVAs] and by-and-for services).

Recommendations

Further high-quality research into the effectiveness of DVSA interventions of perpetrator programmes are required, including randomised controlled studies where appropriate and ethical, to improve certainty regarding the effect estimates generated from evidence syntheses. Published protocols, adherence to reporting guidelines such as CONSORT, STROBE and SQUIRE 2.0, and considering and accounting for confounding factors where randomisation is not feasible, will strengthen the research.

Developing a core outcome set via co-production with survivors and service users, practitioners and service providers, commissioners, policy makers and researchers will increase consistency in reported outcomes and create the cohesion.

To download the VISION Policy Briefing: Measuring the effectiveness of support services and interventions for domestic and sexual violence and abuse in the UK

To cite: Bunce, Annie; Carlisle, Sophie (2025). VISION Policy Briefing: Measuring the effectiveness of support services and interventions for domestic and sexual violence and abuse in the UK. City, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.29852984.v1

For further information, please contact Annie at annie.bunce@citystgeorges.ac.uk

Addressing abuse in teenage relationships

This VISION Policy Brief highlights emerging findings and policy recommendations from ongoing research and stakeholder engagement into abuse in teenage relationships carried out by the UKPRP VISION consortium.

Abuse—whether physical, emotional, or sexual—within young people’s relationships is often overlooked in both research and policy. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) finds that young women aged 16 to 19 are more likely to experience domestic abuse than any other age group. Despite this high prevalence, this age group is less likely to be referred to support services. Furthermore, the CSEW does not cover individuals under the age of 16, leaving a major gap in understanding of prevalence.

Key findings:

  • Lack of consistent terminology and recognition – various terms are used to describe abuse in teenage relationships, including ‘teen dating violence’, ‘adolescent domestic abuse’, ‘teenage relationship abuse’ and ‘youth intimate partner violence’. Both the workshop with young people and the roundtables identified that young people generally do not associate the behaviours they experience with any of these terms and are more likely to use language like ‘toxic relationships’.
  • Very limited UK research on risk and protective factors for under 16s – our rapid review found that in the last 10 years there was only one UK academic study that looked into risk and protective factors for abuse in teenage relationships for those aged under 16.
  • Importance of schools and communities – unlike adult domestic abuse, which is largely experienced in private, abuse experienced in teenage relationships is more likely to occur outside of the home, especially within schools.
  • Very difficult to measure extent of issue – due to the current Home Office definition of domestic abuse there is very limited and consistently recorded administrative data collected on those under 16 who are experiencing abuse.
  • Need to take a more radical review of systems – our discussion highlighted the difficulty of addressing abuse in teenage relationships within the current systems.

Recommendations for change:

  • Develop a national strategy – prevention and early intervention
  • Explore support for young people – victims and those carrying out harmful behaviours
  • Commission research into under 16s – including those with lived experience and taking a whole systems approach
  • Improve measurement in under 16s
  • Agree terminology and produce an associated education programme

To download the policy briefing: VISION Policy Brief: Addressing Abuse in Teenage Relationships

To cite: Weir, Ruth; Barrow-Grint, Katy (2025). VISION Policy Brief: Addressing Abuse in Teenage Relationships. City, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.26539906.v1

For further information, please contact: Ruth at ruth.weir@city.ac.uk

How much violence is there?

This VISION Policy Brief proposes improvements to the definitions and measurement of violence using the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), in order to more fully capture different aspects of violent crime, including violence against women and girls (VAWG). The briefing is aimed at researchers, national statistics offices, and others involved in violence research and policy. It draws on a paper recently published in The British Journal of Criminology, Definition and measurement of violence in the Crime Survey for England and Wales.

Key findings:

  • The current definition of violent crime excludes key types: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) headline measure of ‘violent crime’ currently excludes sexual violence, robberies, threats of violence, and many incidents of violence where criminal damage was also involved.
  • A broader definition would better capture scale, harm and inequalities: We use a broader measure of violence that includes these currently excluded forms of violence. This broader measure not only reveals a higher prevalence of victimisation in the population as a whole, it also reveals hidden inequalities. Women are more likely than men to experience sexual violence and threats of violence: excluding these from current estimates leads to rates of violence in women, especially domestic violence, being underestimated. The proportion of people physically and emotionally harmed by violence is also better estimated using this broader definition, particularly affecting estimates for women.

Recommendation for change:

  • National statistics on violence in England and Wales should show violence estimates using a broader definition of violence alongside violent crime statistics to give a more comprehensive overview of violence and its societal impact.

To download the policy briefing, please see below. To download the paper upon which the policy recommendation is based, please see: Definition and Measurement of Violence in the Crime Survey for England and Wales: Implications for the Amount and Gendering of Violence | The British Journal of Criminology | Oxford Academic

The citation for the paper: Davies, E., Obolenskaya, P., Francis, B., Blom, N., Phoenix, J., Pullerits, M., and Walby, S. (2024), Definition and Measurement of Violence in the Crime Survey for England and Wales: Implications for the Amount and Gendering of Violence, The British Journal of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azae050

VISION Policy Briefing for downloading:

Violence Measurement_VISION Policy BriefingDownload

Violence in the workplace in the United Kingdom

Our latest research examines two nationally representative datasets, The Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) and the UK Household Panel Survey (UKHLS), to examine variance in the prevalence of workplace violence by industrial sector and occupational group.

The authors, Dr Vanessa Gash and Dr Niels Blom, found 28% of commercial businesses reported criminal victimisation on their premises in the past year, including 8% reporting violent victimisation (namely assaults, robberies, and threats).

Using individual-level data, the report also found 8% of employees had been threatened, insulted or physically attacked at work in the past year, and a similar percentage have felt unsafe at work, with public sector workers most at risk.

The authors call for enhanced recognition of the problem of workplace violence for a significant proportion of workers in multiple different sectors, alongside improved policies to minimise workplace violence going forward.

Figure 1. Prevalence of Violence and Fear of Violence in the Workplace by Sector, UKHLS data 2020-2021, weighted estimates

The report can be downloaded here: VISION Policy Report – Violence in the workplace in the UK: Business and individual-level exposure

Acknowledgements:

The report benefited from input and insights from the Home Office, who provided us with access to the Commercial Victimisation Survey used here.

Photograph licensed by Adobe Stock

Learning across statutory reviews

This VISION policy briefing summarises themes arising from the symposium, Learning across statutory review practices: origins, ambitions and future directions, held as part of the 2024 VISION Annual Conference on 11 June.

The symposium was led by Dr Elizabeth Cook, City, UoL, and Dr James Rowlands, University of Westminster.

The following panellists introduced several of the statutory reviews and shared their thoughts on lessons learnt and the future:

  • Dr Bethan Davies, Cardiff University: Wales Single Unified Safeguarding Review (SUSR)
  • Professor Emeritus Jonathan Dickens, University of East Anglia: Child safeguarding
  • Frank Mullane, Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA): Ambitions for learning and change across systems
  • Professor Emeritus Michael Preston-Shoot, University of Bedfordshire: Adult safeguarding
  • Sumanta Roy, Imkaan: Domestic Homicide Reviews

After the series of presentations, as part of breakout roundtable discussions, conference attendees were invited to explore how different statutory reviews are conducted and practised, their ambitions, and challenges for the future.

This briefing is for practitioners and managers who participate in or lead statutory reviews. The briefing will also be of interest to policy makers and senior leaders from local and national government who commission or oversee statutory review processes.

The policy is available in the public domain, Learning across statutory review practices: Origins, ambitions, and future directions (figshare.com).

For further information, please contact Lizzie at elizabeth.cook@city.ac.uk.