Imagine this: you have been living with an abusive partner for several years. The abuse is mostly coercive control, but every now and then he smacks, pushes or chokes you just to make sure you know that he could really hurt you if he wanted to.
Now, you have left him, and he starts stalking you. He doesn’t just follow you to work or show up at your gym when you work out; he also stalks you online. He sends you abusive text messages and writes nasty things about you on social media. You change your email address and your cell phone number and shut down most of your social media accounts. For a couple of weeks, you enjoy blissful silence and start to think maybe you have managed to get ahead of him.
Then, you open your email to see that you have received an e-transfer from him. He owed you several hundred dollars, so you click on the email, hoping that perhaps he has paid you back. Instead, you see a transfer of one cent, with a viciously violent message for you in the small box intended for people to explain what the e-transfer is about. You quickly delete the email, but over the next several hours, dozens more pop into your in-box.
Gaslight plus
Of course, stalking is nothing new in intimate partner violence situations. Abusers have always been able to find ways to monitor their partner or former partner. For example, when I practised law, more than one of my clients told me that her partner kept track of her movements by checking the odometer in the car. These abusers knew exactly how far it was from their apartment to their partner’s workplace, so could tell if she had gone anywhere else during the day.
Before cell phones made it easy for a woman to respond to an abusive partner’s every call or text regardless of where she was, I had clients who could not leave their home – even to go to the laundry room in their apartment building—because their partner called them randomly throughout the day. If they did not answer, there would be consequences when the abuser got home.
Technology offers abusers a whole new world of opportunities, and it never seems to take long for them to figure out new ways to use otherwise helpful technology in their intimidation and control of their partner or former partner.
Now, an abuser with even modest tech skills can track their former partner through GPS placed in their car or in a device or toy belonging to one of the children; spy on her through hidden recording devices in her home or by flying a drone over the house; or control the temperature of the house, turn the oven on and off, or turn on the television or stereo even from thousands of miles away through so-called smart home devices. Technology has made the behaviour of the main character’s activities in George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight look like kindergarten play.
Whose problem is this?
While the criminal law can provide some measure of response to stalking and threatening behaviours in intimate relationships, it’s always after the fact, and it’s seldom enough. Few women – less than 30% — report abuse by their partner or former partner to the police, so no matter how good the law is, it doesn’t help the majority of survivors.
Surely, those who benefit most from these new technologies – the corporations that own social media platforms, GPS systems, smart home devices, the banks that encourage us to do all our business online, and the like – need to be part of finding ways to minimize the ease with which they can become part of an abusive partner’s arsenal of weapons.
When the abuse of e-transfer technology became known in Australia, during a general spike in intimate partner violence during the pandemic, the banks stepped up. The general manager at one bank, Catherine Fitzpatrick, said:
The banks developed measures that allowed them to block transactions in real time when inappropriate language appeared in the message box. Ms Fitzpatrick again:
“The message is simple: we can see you and we won’t tolerate the use of our digital banking platforms to facilitate abuse.”
Since these steps were taken in 2020, 500,000 abusive transactions have been intercepted and 3,000 customers have received a warning letter or had their online banking suspended or their accounts closed.
Meanwhile . . .
When Sault Ste. Marie’s Angie Sweeney ended her relationship with an abusive partner, she took steps to block him from her social media and messaging apps because he had been inundating her with abusive messages. An hour before he shot and killed her on October 24 last year – after which he shot and killed his three children from a previous relationship and shot and critically wounded their mother – he sent her an e-transfer for one cent that included a violent message.
The CBC’s Katie Nicholson reached out to a number of Canadian banks as well as to the Department of Finance. The responses were lukewarm: the government suggested that anyone who feels threatened online or in person should contact their local police. A spokesperson for TD Bank said that such incidents are “rare” and that there is nothing financial institutions can do to block e-transfers.
Obviously, that’s not the experience of Australian banks, which have offered to share their technology free of charge to any financial institution wanting to use it.
The federal government introduced the Online Harms Act in February, with the goal of making the internet a safer place, but it contains nary a mention of abusive use of e-transfer technology.
It’s time for both government and industry in Canada to take this form of abuse seriously and introduce measures to keep women with abusive partners safe.