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The new Panopticon: women’s experiences of mobile phone-mediated coercive control within abusive relationships
Domestic abuse is believed to affect 30% of women worldwide and smartphone ownership is now estimated to exceed the three billion mark. Mobile and smart phones offer perpetrators new and extended opportunities for surveillance and coercive control in their intimate relationships, but there is limited knowledge and theorisation about these impacts on survivors. Semi-structured interviews with twelve heterosexual women living in refuges in the UK revealed that the ubiquity and portability of mobile phones leaves women feeling permanently visible to abusive and coercively controlling partners. This chapter considers the participants’ responses through a Foucauldian lens. We suggest the ‘agile technological surveillance’ facilitated by the smartphones creates a Panopticon effect that caused the participants in this study to regulate their behaviour and conform to their partner’s requirements even when he was not physically present. This could be viewed as a ‘training’ that results in survivors behaving like ‘docile bodies’ and ‘efficient machines’. Practitioners are encouraged to recognise these responses as protective adaptations that can last long after the abuse has ended and to support women in identifying and unpicking these causal links.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Publisher
RoutledgeExternal DOI
Page range
88-100Pages
234.0Book title
Technology and Domestic and Family Violence: Victimisation, Perpetration and ResponsesPlace of publication
LondonISBN
9780367521431Department affiliated with
- Social Work and Social Care Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Delanie Woodlock, Bridget HarrisLegacy Posted Date
2023-02-01First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2023-02-01Usage metrics
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