Technology-Facilitated Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence: An Exploration of Costs and Consequences, United States, 2022

Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) involves tools such as texting, mobile applications, smart devices, telecommunications networks, and social networks to bully, harass, stalk, or intimidate another person. In most cases, the perpetrator is usually someone the victim knows, often in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). Perpetrators exploit the reach, connectivity, and anonymity of information technology services to commit a wide range of cybercrimes targeting specific individuals that can violate the victim's privacy rights, sense of well-being, and have a lasting, damaging impact on their lives.
In partnership with Dr. Mark Cohen, the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), and Ipsos, the Justice Information Resource Network (JIRN) conducted a study to assess the costs and consequences associated with three types of TFA within the context of IPV: cyberstalking, image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), and doxing. The purpose of this project was to produce greater understanding of the harms that victims and the public more generally suffer related to TFA within IPV, both those with tangible financial costs and harms that are intangible, with
attention also paid to the experiences of minors. The goals were:

to document the costs and consequences of three types of TFA (cyberstalking, IBSA, and doxing);
to estimate prevalence of these crimes via a nationally-representative, general population survey;
to provide willingness-to-pay estimates of their costs via discrete choice experiment (DCE); and
to use the results of achieving goals 2 and 3 to estimate the costs of cyberstalking, IBSA, and doxing to the United States.
This study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 consisted of qualitative work to document the consequences to victims of the three forms of TFA in their complexity and interrelatedness. Activities included interviews with service provider professionals, subject matter experts, and survivor-advocates, a literature review, and three advisory board meetings. Phase 2 involved a
nationally-representative, general population survey to estimate (a) the
prevalence of TFA in the U.S., (b) the proportion of TFA that is associated
with IPV, (c) cost values by asking respondents that disclose victimization
about their out-of-pocket costs, and (d) DCEs to estimate the costs to society
(i.e., the public's willingness-to-pay) associated with cyberstalking, IBSA,
and doxing.
<strong>This collection only contains the survey data. Qualitative data will be released at a future date.</strong>