It’s Not About the Tech: Why the Most Dangerous Weapon in Domestic Abuse Is Still the Perpetrator
By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute
At this year’s Association of Family and Conciliation Courts conference in New Orleans, I had the privilege of joining colleagues to present on a topic that feels simultaneously urgent and timeless: the intersection of emerging technologies and coercive control. The headlines might be dominated by stories about smart homes, deepfakes, and spyware, but the truth is simpler and more sobering: Perpetrators of domestic abuse have always adapted to new tools. The danger isn’t the tech. It’s the person using it—and the systems that enable them.
Tech Abuse Isn’t New. It Just Got Better Branding.
From landlines and pagers in the 1990s to spyware apps and AI-generated images today, the evolution of technology-facilitated abuse has tracked neatly with tech innovation. But the underlying behavior—a perpetrator seeking to dominate, monitor, and control their partner and children—hasn’t changed. The mediums evolve. The motive doesn’t.
My portion of presentation in New Orleans mapped this trajectory: how the abuser’s toolkit has grown from phone calls and stalking via GPS to leveraging cloud calendars, co-parenting apps, and smart thermostats to unsettle, surveil, and exert power. It’s easy to get dazzled or alarmed by new capabilities. But focusing on the novelty of the tools distracts from the more important analysis: What is the pattern of behavior? Who is using the technology, and how?
The Pattern, Not the Platform
The Safe & Together Model has always emphasized a perpetrator pattern–based approach. In the tech context, this means shifting away from seeing digital abuse as a series of isolated “incidents” and instead recognizing how tech enables ongoing, 24/7 coercive control. The abuser doesn’t need to be physically present to dominate. A location-sharing app or smart doorbell can become a tool for surveillance and harassment.
Importantly, the most effective tech-facilitated abuse doesn’t depend on novelty. It depends on trust. Perpetrators exploit intimate knowledge of their partners: passwords, routines, triggers, fears. They hijack the familiar—text messages, shared iCloud accounts, child-monitoring apps—to destabilize survivors. Focusing on the technology obscures the intrusion into daily routine—the disruptions and the dislocations experienced by adult and child survivors. The tech changes, but the loss of safety, self-determination, and quality of life remains the same.
When Every Day Becomes Exploitative
Because technology is now embedded in nearly every aspect of our lives, the line between consensual, even helpful, use and abuse can be difficult to draw. Location-tracking is a prime example. In many families, it’s a practical tool for coordinating pickups, ensuring safety, or providing peace of mind. But in the context of coercive control, the same tool becomes a weapon. When one partner insists on knowing the other’s whereabouts under the guise of safety but uses it to monitor, interrogate, or punish, the intention shifts from care to control. The challenge for practitioners is not to assess the tech itself but to analyze how it’s being used, by whom, and for what purpose.
When Systems Mirror the Abuse
Perhaps most troubling is how our own systems can amplify this harm. Increasingly, predictive analytics and algorithmic decision-making are being used in child welfare and criminal justice. But what happens when these systems are trained on biased data—on records that reflect decades of mother-blaming, minimization of male violence, and pathologizing of survivors’ trauma responses?
We risk building decision-making engines that enshrine the very myths the Safe & Together Model works to dismantle. If systems don’t account for perpetrator behavior as a core driver of risk, and if they ignore how survivors engage in protective strategies that may look like “non-compliance” or “instability,” then those systems become digital perpetrators themselves.
Reframing Tech Use Through a Pattern-Based Lens
To respond effectively, we need to:
Ask the right questions: Who installed the app? Who controls the devices? Who benefits from the surveillance?
Document specific behaviors, not just incidents: Did the abuser use the smart thermostat to wake the survivor at 3 a.m.? Did he send hundreds of texts per day while claiming shared parenting rights?
Recognize survivors as digital strategists: Many survivors take sophisticated steps to protect themselves and their children online. That resilience must be documented and validated.
Our Call to Action
We must stop reacting to tech abuse as if it’s a new problem with each innovation. The patterns are old. The behaviors are familiar. What changes is the interface—and the stakes.
As practitioners, policymakers, and systems leaders, we need to build our responses around the perpetrator’s pattern of behavior, not the flashiness of the tool. And we need to ensure that our own use of technology—whether in assessment tools or case management systems—doesn’t replicate the harms we’re trying to prevent.
At the Safe & Together Institute, we’ll keep naming the pattern, partnering with survivors, and advocating for systems that see through the smoke of the next big app to focus on the real source of harm: the person choosing to abuse.
Additional Resources
Blog: Beyond the Risk Score: Elevating Survivor Strengths and Restoring Professional Judgment
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
