Intimate partner abuse can be a harrowing, life-threatening experience for victims. Unfortunately, current tech advances seem more often to aid the abuser in contacting, tracking down, harassing, and intimidating the survivor.
Now, researchers are seeking to turn that around. Recognizing how intimate partner abuse’s three phases—physical control, escape from abuser, and life apart—affect survivors’ technology use, technology creators can better understand and support this population’s digital security and privacy needs.
“Survivors of IPA would greatly benefit from a technology community that understands and continues to address their unique challenges. To help technology creators better support survivors of IPA, we share findings from a study aimed at understanding this population’s digital privacy and security experiences and practices,” the new study says.
Read more about their efforts in the September/October 2017 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy. (Login may be required for full text.)
About Lori Cameron
Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.
