Technology as a Tool of Coercive Control: When the Screen Becomes the Weapon
By Leah Vejzovic, LMSW, North America Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
Coercive control has never been limited to physical space. Perpetrators have always used whatever tools are available to monitor, isolate, and control. And today, those tools are more powerful, more invisible, and more embedded in daily life than ever before.
For practitioners working within a domestic abuse–informed framework, recognizing technology-facilitated abuse isn’t optional. It is a core competency. The same perpetrator patterns that shape how a person controls their partner’s movements, finances, and relationships also shape how they weaponize technology. Understanding that pattern is what allows us to see it clearly and to stop misattributing its effects to survivor behavior.
Devices Are Not Neutral
A shared family tablet. A location-sharing app set up “for safety.” A smart doorbell. A joint streaming account with a shared password. None of these are inherently harmful, and that is precisely what makes them so effective as tools of control.
Perpetrators exploit the ordinariness of connected technology. They install monitoring software on a partner’s phone under the guise of family coordination. They use shared cloud accounts to read messages and emails. They configure smart home devices like locks, thermostats, and cameras to surveil and, in some cases, to frighten. They track location through apps the survivor may not even know are running.
The result is a surveillance structure that follows the survivor into every space, every conversation, every attempt to seek help or support. And because it looks like normal everyday technology use, it is frequently invisible to the workers, advocates, and systems the survivor encounters. And sometimes even to the survivors themselves.
Financial Technology and Economic Entrapment
Economic abuse has always been a cornerstone of perpetrator control patterns, and digital financial tools have significantly expanded the toolkit. Perpetrators use shared banking apps to monitor every transaction in real time, creating a chilling effect on purchases that might signal independence or help-seeking. They use payment platforms to send harassing messages alongside small transfers. They configure alerts that notify them when a card is used, effectively placing a tracker on the survivor’s economic activity.
In some cases, perpetrators leverage their partner’s digital financial identity by accessing accounts, taking out credit, or destroying credit scores. These behaviors create long-lasting economic harm that survives the relationship itself. For child welfare practitioners, this is relevant: economic destabilization directly affects a parent’s capacity to meet their children’s needs, and the source of that destabilization is the perpetrator’s pattern, not the survivor’s choices.
Post-Separation Escalation
Technology-facilitated abuse frequently intensifies after separation—a pattern that mirrors broader research on perpetrator behavior in the post-separation period. When physical proximity is removed, perpetrators may increase their use of digital surveillance, harassment, and manipulation.
This can include monitoring children’s devices during parenting time to gather information about the survivor parent (including their location in shelter/refuge), using co-parenting apps as a new channel for coercive communication, and recruiting family members or mutual contacts on social media to maintain monitoring by proxy. Court-mandated co-parenting technology, intended to protect survivors, can itself become a vector for continued abuse if it is not implemented with a perpetrator-pattern lens.
Child welfare practitioners need to ask: What is the perpetrator’s digital pattern? How does their use of technology map onto their broader pattern of coercive control? The answer will rarely surface if we frame our assessment around the survivor’s relationship to technology rather than the perpetrator’s use of it. Domestic violence advocacy services also need to receive specialized training in how to identify these behaviors in collaboration with survivors.
What Domestic Abuse–Informed Practice Looks Like
A domestic abuse–informed approach to technology-facilitated abuse begins with mapping the perpetrators patterns specific to their use of technology. Technology like monitoring apps, location tracking, financial surveillance, and device control must be thoughtfully included in any mapping of perpetrator behavior. It is not a sidenote to the coercive control pattern; it is an expression of that pattern that we must document and then clearly connect to impact on child and family functioning.
Practitioners should be routinely asking about technology in their assessments. Not as a checklist item, but as a genuine inquiry into how the perpetrator uses digital tools to gain and maintain control. This includes asking survivors about which devices they share, which accounts are joint, whether they believe their communications are being monitored, and whether the other parent has access to their location or their children’s location. It also includes asking about social media as a potential landscape for abuse, including posting personal information or photos without permission or making threats.
Safety planning must also address the digital dimension: working with survivors to understand what is being monitored and its impact, how to create private communication channels, and how to document technology-facilitated abuse in ways that can support adult and child survivors and hold perpetrators accountable.
The Pattern Is the Point
Technology does not create coercive control. Perpetrators do. What technology does is extend the reach of that control, making walls thinner, distances shorter, and escape unsafe. When we map what the perpetrator is doing with technology, we stop treating the digital dimension as a separate issue and start seeing it for what it is: one more expression of a pattern designed to control and harm.
Seeing and documenting the pattern and the harm caused is the first step to disrupting it.
Additional Resources
Blog: It’s Not About the Tech: Why the Most Dangerous Weapon in Domestic Abuse Is Still the Perpetrator
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
