Planetary pathways for policy

Re-focussing policy towards justice and care

Orbits is a field guide on how to tackle tech abuse through interventions that are intersectional, trauma-informed and survivor-centred. It focuses on three areas which are vital to effectively addressing tech abuse — technology, research, and policy — and proposes a set of design principles to design more impactful interventions.

In this blog, we’ll focus on policy, and summarise why it’s an important part of the solution, what is wrong with policy interventions as they currently stand; and how to approach policy-making to create safer solutions for survivors.

Why focus on policy?

The policy landscape governs the systems which enable and attempt to address tech abuse globally. Criminal and civil law focusing on survivors as well as regulations targeted towards the private sector can be powerful tools for holding both individuals and institutions to account. Effectively tackling tech abuse will require a transformation of both.

What are policies getting wrong?

Policies to tackle tech abuse are often drastically inadequate. They often fail survivors from inception to implementation. Given the ever-changing and accelerated pace of technology, policy often lags significantly behind when it comes to properly defining tech abuse in its many forms. As tech has developed over the years, it has been evident at every milestone that it can, and likely will, be used to cause harm. From email messages leading to incredible levels of spam and social media posts leading to online violence, hate, and text-based abuse, to the unprecedented use of video calling during the pandemic leading to ‘Zoom bombing’ difficulties — the law simply hasn’t been able to keep up. Instead, survivors and those trying to support them are often made to navigate a complex web of copyright, IT, criminal, and other laws.

Some countries have no stand-alone legislation to address the different forms of TGBV, meaning existing laws have to suffice. For example, the UK has only recently proposed criminalising cyberflashing, among other harmful acts, in its new Online Harms Bill (though there are many problems with this legislation highlighted in this open letter we’ve signed). Instead, there exists a confusing patchwork of laws that makes it complicated and difficult for victims to seek justice. Some countries have laws that do little to tend to the needs of survivors, while others have laws that are actively harmful. Even where laws and policy do exist on paper, they are often lacking in scope, depth, and nuance. Frequently, they are too narrow: they focus on the specific type of abuse while ignoring the larger context and impact it can have. For example, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of the Philippines has been widely critiqued for incorporating badly-defined, vague, and overboard elements, which ultimately put women at risk.

At times, the law also excludes considerations for those who are most marginalised, such as migrant or traveller communities, sex workers, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The plurality of survivor experiences is frequently neglected. Even governmental or other organisational bodies that are created specifically to respond to tech abuse often have gaps in their understanding which limits the types of online harms, age ranges, and communities they will consider supporting. This leads to inconsistencies between what is recognised by law or policy and the diverse ways in which survivors of tech abuse experience that law or policy in practice. Laws, policies, and justice processes related to tech abuse, where they do exist, tend to apply one-size-fits-all definitions and rules. When policies fail to take stock of the different lived realities of survivors, and ignore aspects of people’s identity such as gender, sexuality, race, national origin, class, and age, they end up treating the dominant social group as the standard around which laws are crafted, making it particularly difficult for marginalised groups to access justice. Since many of these communities are already heavily policed or criminalised, they are left without any adequate recourse.

For survivors who seek justice, a significant barrier is the retraumatisation caused due to the reporting and justice process. From victim blaming and lack of privacy, to rigid sentencing frameworks focused on criminalisation instead of justice, survivors face a range of issues. For instance, survivors may hesitate to approach the police for fear of being shamed or dismissed. Research has shown that police have failed to take tech abuse cases as seriously as physical abuse.

Finally, tech abuse inevitably includes more than one party. Besides the survivor and the primary perpetrator, there are often many more actors involved. Most countries do not have the legal mechanisms to hold technology platforms, website hosts, or downstream distributors (those who repost or redistribute the image) accountable for the abusive content they may be hosting or sharing. Legal systems tend to look at tech abuse as an individual instance of harm rather than a systemic one and thus leave it up to platforms to find a solution. One of the ways in which this can place undue burden on a survivor is to make them responsible for removing their own images or private details from the internet.

How can policy play a more powerful role in supporting survivors?

Policy measures have an important role to play in tackling tech abuse. These policies can be used to provide recourse to harm, provide protections for survivors, and even support tech companies to play a better role in preventing TGBV in the first place.

An intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed approach to policy should encourage more nuanced practices when it comes to tackling TGBV. Policymakers should be thinking broadly about how to address tech abuse and support survivors in a meaningful way at every level. This could mean:

• Incorporating a deeper understanding of how technology is used and accessed by different people
• Acknowledging the multiplicity of lived experiences and varied ways in which tech abuse happens, ultimately highlighting and meeting the need for multiple and varied support mechanisms
• Developing legal definitions to avoid causing further harm to already marginalised communities
• Ensuring that tech abuse is treated as a form of GBV and considering the need for safe reporting mechanisms and protections for victims
• Cultivating a better understanding of how online violence can cause as much harm as offline violence and the myriad of ways in which trauma can manifest as a result
• Creating processes to ensure that survivors feel validated and supported, rather than retraumatised
• Developing policies in a way that centres survivors and recognises them as experts in their own experiences
• Considering the accessibility of the language used in the policy and moving away from too much jargon or use of victim blaming language
• Building in the wider frameworks needed to ensure that survivors have access to the support which the policy seeks to offer them, such as ease of accessing mental health support
• Creating additional guidance and allocating appropriate resources for those who will be implementing the policy, including for training, outreach, and community support

The Orbits principles in practice

We can apply the Orbits principles to policy to see how policy can better support survivors. Below are a few examples of how policymakers can employ the Orbits principles to tackle TGBV.

1. Safety

• Ensuring that policies include clear wording that allows survivors to identify the purpose of the policy, as well as the potential remedies available. This may mean refraining from using jargon which may confuse or alienate survivors and producing further guidance which explains and breaks down the law for those who are implementing it, as well as the general public.
• Creating processes that allow for an iterative definition of TGBV, which potentially changes or grows over time to allow for the continuously new ways in which TGBV is perpetrated across new and old technologies.
• Categorising tech abuse laws within GBV laws and frameworks to account for the specifically gendered ways in which this harm often manifests.

2. Agency

• Drafting laws in a way that focuses on the survivor’s consent (or lack thereof) instead of the perpetrator’s intention.
• Building consent into various stages of the process, ensuring that the survivor knows how their information is going to be used and that they are able to opt out of the reporting process at any stage.
• Making independent third party reporting platforms available as a choice for survivors to access support.

3. Equity

• Providing free legal assistance, support, and counselling to survivors and individuals from low-income and marginalised communities.
• Creating policy guides to help survivors (and support workers) navigate the suite of tech abuse policies and help them identify which ones may apply to their situations.
• Embedding interpreters throughout the process for those who are more comfortable interacting in a language other than that used by the courts, police and/or prosecutors.

4. Privacy

• Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality protections for tech abuse survivors as given under GBV laws and sexual assault shield laws.
• Protecting and withholding survivors’ personal details, from perpetrators in particular. Any right to confront a witness is done within a safe court setting, and with the support of an advocate/support worker upon the survivor’s request.
• Informing survivors of who is working on and/or has knowledge of their case within a legal or support team, and giving survivors the opportunity to withdraw consent to sharing further details of their case.

5. Accountability

• Placing a legal duty of care on tech companies across the distribution chain to ensure that they have adequate infrastructure to prevent tech abuse and to support survivors.
• Setting a minimum regulatory standard for the industry to have specific processes in place to manage TGBV, with penalties for tech companies that do not meet these.
• Developing feedback loops and consultations to allow ongoing input from survivors and the public on existing and new policies related to tech abuse.

6. Plurality

• Providing guidance and training for judges and law enforcement on the ways min which tech abuse manifests and impacts different communities.
• Supporting community leaders and maintaining that specific service providers for specific marginalised communities (such as those for LGBTQ+ people, Black people, people of colour, etc.) are well resourced, rather than amalgamating all services into one generic, centralised body.
• Training those who implement policy on intersectionality and the ways in which harm can be compounded when someone is sitting at multiple sites of oppression.

7. Power redistribution

• Making space and allocating resources to support survivors who want to lead drafting or inputting on policies and laws that affect them.
• Ensuring that processes and frameworks are co-designed by survivors.
• Communities are consulted through different stages of policymaking.

8. Hope

• Creating and funding survivor assistance helplines that can provide immediate counselling, resources, and legal assistance.
• Making other forms of healing available, beyond the court system, such as acknowledgment of the harm, apologies, or mechanisms enabling offenders to understand their wrongdoing.
• Ensuring that all systems which survivors must go through are engaged and considered in creating a seamless policy that looks at both support and prevention. This includes the social service system, the health care system, the education system, and administrative (workplace) spaces. Experts from within these spaces are included in the policymaking process.

These are just a few of the examples of what the Orbits principles look like when applied to policy. Read many more in Orbits. You can download the full guide at c.chayn.co/orbits or read the policy chapters here.