From remotely-controlled smart cars to menacing Netflix messages, tech-facilitated abuse is keeping up with the times.
After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found ways to monitor her behavior. One Christmas, he gave their youngest a smartwatch. Gioia showed it to a tech-savvy friend, who found that the watch had a tracking feature turned on. It could be turned off only by the watch’s owner—her ex.
“What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” says Gioia, who is going by a pseudonym in this story out of safety concerns. “She’s so excited but doesn’t realize [it’s] a monitoring device for him to see where we are.” In the end, she decided not to confiscate the watch. Instead, she told her daughter to leave it at home whenever they went out together, saying that this way it wouldn’t get lost.
Gioia says she has informed a family court of this and many other instances in which her ex has used or appeared to use technology to stalk her, but so far this hasn’t helped her get full custody of her children. The court’s failure to recognize these tech-facilitated tactics for maintaining power and control has left her frustrated to the point where she yearns for visible bruises. “I wish he was breaking my arms and punching me in the face,” she says, “because then people could see it.”
