Launching into Orbit
A new field guide to advance intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed interventions to TGBV
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TGBV), or tech abuse, is a problem of planetary proportions. All around the world, abuse, and violence is being perpetrated through technology, and new forms of TGBV are continuously emerging. The scale and depth of the problem, and the resulting harm to women and people of marginalised genders, requires urgent action.
From January 2021 — June 2022, Chayn and End Cyber Abuse went on a journey to understand the nature of TGBV and how we can address it. We chronicled our voyage on this blog. The result is Orbits: a guide on how we can design interventions to tech abuse which are intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed. Co-created with thinkers, practitioners, and survivors from around the world, the guide focuses on three areas which are vital for effectively tackling tech abuse: technology, research, and policy. It explores how systems are failing survivors and how we can design interventions that leave no survivor behind.
Orbits includes an overview of what TGBV is and how it impacts survivors, analysis of how existing responses from technology, research, and policy are lacking, and suggestions for how we can design better systems in these three areas. It proposes a set of design principles as the basis of an intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed approach, and provides examples of what they look like in practice. It showcases work being done to tackle tech abuse through case studies, and offers practical tools for applying the principles to your own work and context.
You can download Orbits here.
We’d like to thank everyone who made Orbits possible: Robert Bosch Stiftung for funding the project, all the experts interviewed for their tremendous insight and knowledge, Chayn and End Cyber Abuse’s volunteers for their hard work and dedication, the peers and allies who contributed to our consultation workshops and gave comments on a draft of the guide, and, most of all, the survivors who shared their stories with us.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, reflections, and feedback on the guide, if/how you can use it in your work, and where we should go next with this project. Get in touch to let us know. We’d also love your help in sharing Orbits! Use this social media pack to share Orbits on your online channels.
