5 June 2024 – Today, Women’s Shelters Canada’s (WSC) Tech Safety Canada Project released two reports on the impact and prevalence of tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). Across Canada, technology is being misused by perpetrators to harm women, girls, and gender-diverse people.

Insights Into Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: A Survey of Women’s Shelter and Transition House Workers Across Canada shows that 95% of shelter workers reported working with a survivor who disclosed experiencing TFGBV. The types of abuse most commonly facilitated by technology include harassment, closely followed by threats and location tracking.

“Tech-facilitated violence profoundly impacts survivors’ lives,” said Rhiannon Wong, Tech Safety Canada Manager at WSC. “Along with the continued abuse perpetrators are inflicting, this violence also affects survivors’ access to services, social connection, housing, employment, and domestic and sexual violence support.”

The report includes information on the prevalence and forms of violence, the technology and devices used, the barriers to addressing this violence, knowledge gaps, and recommendations for companies, government, police and justice system actors, and frontline workers and organizations.

How Canada’s Mobile Phone Providers Can Help End TFGBV looks at how Bell, Rogers, and TELUS’s policies and practices create barriers for survivors of gender-based violence and can directly impact their privacy and safety. This report addresses two key policy and practice issues that survivors and frontline workers have identified in the telecommunications sector: the cost of changing a phone number and the difficulty of leaving a shared family plan.

“Our team contacted multiple customer service agents at all three companies,” said Leah Stuart-Sheppard, Interim Co-Executive Director at WSC. “At all three companies, we found issues around access, inconsistency, cost, requiring survivors to involve the abuser in separating from a shared plan, and requiring credit checks to set up new accounts.”

The report outlines concerning issues for each of the three companies along with recommendations to them to improve policies and experiences for survivors of domestic violence and TFGBV who are trying to change their phone number or get out of a shared plan/account. Bell, Rogers, and TELUS were all provided with a copy of this report before publication; their responses are available as an appendix to the report.

Join us later today, June 5, at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT on Zoom to hear the key findings of both reports, ask questions, and learn more about how TFGBV affects survivors across the country. There will also be a demo of Tech Safety Canada’s two new online tools: Digital Breakup Tool and Home Tech Tool. The event is in English, but questions can be asked in English or French.

Women’s Shelters Canada’s Tech Safety Canada project aims to advance systemic change on the issue of TFGBV by equipping anti-violence workers with the knowledge and resources they need to support women, children, and gender-diverse people with their experiences of TFGBV. TFGBV is part of a continuum of violence that can take place both online and in-person. It refers to any violent or abusive act, such as domestic violence, harassment, stalking, sexual assault, impersonation, extortion, and the non-consensual filming and sharing of intimate images, carried out via technological devices, digital spaces, and apps.

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For media enquiries, contact:
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Interim Co-Executive Director and Director of Communications
kbardswich@endvaw.ca

Women’s Shelters Canada brings together 16 provincial and territorial shelter organizations and supports the over 600 shelters across the country for women and children fleeing violence. If you or someone you know is experiencing violence, you can find your nearest women’s shelter and its crisis line on www.sheltersafe.ca. Visit www.techsafety.ca to find additional information and resources about technology-facilitated violence, technology safety planning, and preserving digital evidence.