With the rising threat of tech-facilitated abuse of women and girls, we speak to Marnie who experienced domestic violence and coercive control as a teenagers ahead of Refuge’s Tech Summit
Marnie didn’t realise at first that her teenage boyfriend was using her phone to control her. Then the phone checking became obsessive.
“I was getting my phone checked all the time,” she says. “He’d always find a way to get past the security. Or he’d say, ‘open your phone or I know you are cheating’. There was never anything on there of course, just messages from friends and family.” Aged 16, she had no model for ‘normal’ teenage relationships, and, to begin with, thought his behaviour just part of having an attentive boyfriend. Then, as her abuser – also 16 years old – began the process of cutting her off from her friends and family, he started to delete messages before she had seen them.
“If I went to the toilet, he would go through my phone and delete messages so I wouldn’t know my mum was looking for me – or even that she had tried to contact me,” Marnie says. “He didn’t like me talking to anyone at all.” The young couple had been at the same school since childhood – and were in the sixth form together, at the same school. After school, he insisted they spend time in his bedroom at his parents’ house. He controlled what Marnie wore and where she went.
“He was always checking up on me, where I was going,” Marnie says. “He wouldn’t believe me. If I was out, it was lots and lots of missed phone calls and constant text messages, and then turning up to check I was there. Then he would start to turn up at my place of work. I had a job as a waitress at a hotel and he would phone the hotel to make sure I was there. He was very controlling mentally. He would lock me in his bedroom and not let me out. He broke my phone and cut my lip open.”
This week, the drama series Adolescence swept the board at this year’s Emmy’s – winning limited series, directing, writing and three acting awards. It shines a light on misogyny and incel culture in secondary schools, and – with its central character radicalised online – asks how the interaction between our online and offline worlds is affecting today’s teenagers.
Despite living with PTSD, Marnie managed to bring herself to watch the series. “I found Adolescence quite a difficult thing to watch, but I did watch it and I’m glad I did,” she says. “It’s such an important story. It’s brought a huge amount of attention to the topic. I didn’t know what misogyny was when I was a teenager, but that’s what it was.
“When it comes to toxic masculinity someone like Andrew Tate has millions of followers, and there is so much content young boys can pick up on the internet. We need to raise awareness in the younger age groups. There was nothing for me to realise I was in a domestic abuse relationship. It took a lot for me to accept I was even one. There needs to be a support network in schools that could see the signs in families and in relationships – that’s what I didn’t have. But it also takes work with boys – they need to know what’s right and what’s wrong if we want to stop it from happening.”
The series’ success comes as domestic violence charity Refuge launches a Tech Summit next week, in response to the rising threat of tech-facilitated abuse. Technology has radically changed abuse, especially for the younger generation. Refuge says tech-faciliated abuse is “one of the most dangerously under-reported forms of violence against women and girls”.
Addressing the summit will be Adolescence writer Jack Thorne – who came home with one of those Emmy Awards, for outstanding writing for a limited series. Thorne has said that when he confronted the ‘manosphere’ as part of his research he immediately saw its attraction.
“Writing it, I was shocked at how much of Jamie I had in me,” he said. “His pain, his anger, contains sides of me I didn’t want to see. He comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.”
Tech-facilitated abuse can be as simple as checking someone’s phone or using it to track their movements, sharing intimate images non-consensually, or the existence of groups on platforms like Signal spreading misogyny online. But it is also evolving with technology.
“Survivors are increasingly being abused through the weaponisation of a growing range of emerging technologies – from surveillance via spy-cams, to so-called ‘nudification’ apps that generate deepfakes, and dark web forums that share and exploit images of survivors,” says BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire, who is also addressing the conference. To prevent this kind of abuse devastating even more lives, we must stay ahead of its rapid evolution. Refuge’s pioneering Tech Summit is leading this charge, examining how safety can be built into the very fabric of technology and algorithmic design.”
A recent UK-wide poll commissioned by Refuge found that fewer than 1 in 3 people would report certain kinds of digital coercion if they happened to them or someone they know – such as location tracking (30%) or someone demanding phone access. While just 58% would report the non-consensual sharing of intimate images – falling to 44% among 18–24-year-olds.
Responding to this hidden crisis, the Tech Safety Summit aims to showcase survivor-informed solutions – including using tagging technology to prevent the spread of intimate images. It will also examine the role of AI, with speakers including Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes and major tech companies.
Marnie is grown up now, and happily married to someone else, but is still affected by surviving abuse as a teenager. She has suffered with nightmares and flashbacks. “I’d see his face, and I would think someone was him,” she says. Since she was a teenager, technology has kept on radically transforming, and – fuelled by online and offline misogyny – perpetrators are adapting, finding new ways to abuse, manipulate and control. “People inside the tech companies need to take responsibility,” Marnie says. “They are letting people get away with abuse.”