New research highlights the growing role of technology in domestic and family violence, alongside gaps in support for victims experiencing digital abuse.

A UNSW study has found that support and resources for Technology-Facilitated Abuse (TFA) are not keeping pace with how common it is.

As part of the study, Dr Rahat Masood and her team crawled 306 government, non-government, and relevant commercial domains and collected 52,605 unique web pages that contained content related to domestic and family violence, online safety, or digital abuse.

Dr Masood, from the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security (IFCyber) and School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), said the findings showed there was a stark mismatch when it came to support.

Technology-facilitated behaviours are increasingly embedded within intimate partner violence and coercive control. Australian data shows that 51% of adults have experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated abuse, while 54% of women who experienced stalking by an intimate partner reported electronic stalking during the first incident.

Dr Masood’s study found content relating to abuse such as harassment and sexual abuse dominates support resources – contributing to about 70% of all abuse-labelled web pages reviewed in the study. Less than 1% of pages address TFA such as covert surveillance, economic abuse or long-term controlling behaviours.

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Dr Masood, along with CSE colleagues Dipankar Srirag, Xiaolin Cen and Aditya Joshi, presented the findings at the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy in Perth in July.

“There’s a large body of research out there, but governments and organisations don’t know how to translate that research into legal support and practical resources,” Dr Masood said.

The research also examined how online resources address prevention, detection and support across the technology-facilitated abuse lifecycle. Legal measures accounted for 49 per cent of prevention-related pages, while family safeguarding accounted for 15 per cent. Technology-based safeguards, public awareness and education, and digital community networks collectively accounted for less than 1 per cent.

For detection, clinical approaches accounted for 49 per cent of relevant pages, while incidental discovery represented 21 per cent. The researchers found that institutional and community reporting, as well as device detection, were effectively absent from the resources examined.

Support resources were also concentrated around digital information hubs, which accounted for 62 per cent of support-related pages. By comparison, the research found less emphasis on counselling, legal assistance and community-based services.

The study also assessed the readability of online resources. Much of the content was written at late secondary or early tertiary reading levels, which the researchers said may make information less accessible to some people seeking support.