Refuge's Tech Safety Newsletter December 2024
Christmas Gifting and Tech Abuse
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the festive holidays, the gift giving season is well and truly here. In this article we look at some popular gifts for children and adults, whilst also discussing some safety precautions survivors may want to take.
The TonieBox allows parents to download audio books and stories onto the speaker so children can listen in their own time. There is an app which connects to the box where parents can download audio books and record their own stories for children. As with any toys that connects to an app, it’s advisable to get to know what exactly the toy does to mitigate any risks.
The children’s smart watch market is growing and there may be many appearing in kids’ stockings this year, with some designed for children as young as 5. This particular VTech watch counts steps, records and has basic photography functions, but others may have different or more advanced features. If your child is gifted a watch like this, treating it like any smart watch and taking any precautions round using the device is advisable.
Another Apple series has been released this year, and the iPad is a staple under the Christmas tree. If you are lucky enough to be gifted an iPad, consider who set up the device and look at how to secure the device using our tech safety website. Moreover, many iPads can be part of a family sharing features network, which can share images, location and subscriptions across devices, which may be important for survivors to know.
Although Smart Glasses, such as the Ray Ban Meta glasses have been around for several years, 2024 was when they really took off in popularity. Depending on the make and model, smart glasses can have cameras to record, will show notifications onto the lenses in the screen and many will also have inbuilt GPS. Whilst extremely handy for some glasses wearers, these features could be misused by perpetrators.
If you are looking for a gift for the for the fitness fanatic in your life, the Smart Ring could be a good option. Smart rings, such as the Samsung Galaxy Ring capture similar data to a smart watch, including your sleep rates, heart rate and menstrual cycle, helping you to get the most out of your workout. However, with the ring collecting such personal health information, users may need to be cautious about who has access to the health information it collects and if this could put them at risk.
If you or anyone you are supporting is concerned about their technology or worried about any gifts that they have received, the Refuge tech safety website could be a good place to start to learn more about the settings of certain tech gifts.
2024 Wrapped up!
Technology Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment Team 2024 highlights
As another year draws to a close, we are all encouraged to reflect, it’s also a great time to celebrate all our achievements and refocus our goals ready for 2025. So, with that in mind, we invite you to read about some of our highlights this year.
2024 has been another great year for the team who all work so passionately towards achieving our strategic values. We continued to deliver on our strategy and launched to partners in the VAWG sector in May 2024, you can find more information about our strategy here.
At the heart of what we do is always our survivors, and we continue to offer support directly to survivors and to our keyworkers supporting survivors both in Refuge services and for survivors accessing the National Domestic Abuse Helpline. 97% of women report feeling empowered after receiving support with their technology. We have gifted tech to survivors including burner phones, smartphones, tablets, and Ring devices to allow them to continue to use technology safely and have successfully applied for grants to support survivors with financial barriers to leaving or moving on from abuse. Our economic abuse support has seen approximately £42,000 in debt written off for survivors in the last 6 months. The team have also offered support to other smaller charities to guide them in addressing more complex tech and economic related challenges including providing gifted tech to the survivors they are supporting.
We hosted our first UK Tech Safety Summit in September this year, this was held virtually over two days and welcomed 211 attendees from different sectors and industries. The event was well received with lots of positive feedback. “I have never attended a better online event; the platform was engaging, and the sessions were incredible”. We will be hosting this event annually so please do keep a look out for information on next year’s summit. Announcements will be made on our Tech Safety Website.
Our partnership with Barclays won the Gold Award in the “Best Charity, NGO or NFP Programme” category at the Corporate Engagement Awards in September this year. This award highlighted the impactful collaboration between Refuge and Barclays, particularly noting the significance of Barclay’s funding for the Economic Tech Abuse Lead role and the direct referral pathway established between the two organisations. This partnership helps ensure more survivors can safely access a bank account and are supported to regain financial independence, for many survivors this is a lifeline that helps ensure they can have access to their own finances and rebuild their financial resilience.
Our CPD accredited training packages have been delivered to agencies helping upskill agencies when supporting and responding to technology-facilitated abuse concerns. Training has been delivered to police, domestic abuse practitioners, health care practitioners, social workers and housing providers. We have also delivered workshops for children and parents in our Refuges delivered by our Youth Tech Lead, which has received positive responses from parents and care givers on the need for developing tech skills and literacy. The children’s workshops have been engaging and informative and have helped shape our knowledge on trends young people are reporting when using social media platforms.
Our Home Office Tech-Facilitated Abuse Partnership Project has delivered 80 training sessions since January, which translates to 508 professionals reached. As part of the project, we have continued to carry out consultations with our partners; Galop, Stay Safe East, Sign Health, BlindAid and Karma Nirvana and we have delivered training across several additional by and for charities. In addition to this the team have delivered empowerment workshops across the country and delivered national training to by-and-for agencies, ensuring the knowledge we have acquired is shared across the sector to impact more survivors from marginalised communities.
The team have attended events including engaging with Ofcom’s VAWG workshop bringing survivor’s voices to the session for consideration in code of practice being designed. We spoke at the City Forum Conference on the Online Safety Act and impact on survivors. We spoke to the Home Office alongside the National Domestic Abuse Helpline to share concerns our survivors are facing and the impact of our work. We participated in a Family Jurisdiction Public Engagement Group highlighting importance of ensuring online digital records are secure. Our team have also spoken internationally attending panels in Madrid, Geneva, Belgium, and Greece to raise awareness of our work.
Partnerships established with Ring ensured that in addition to donated devices for survivors, we were able to offer consultation support to Ring on key product features ensuring that survivor voice was centred in our feedback. We have provided consultation to other agencies including feedback to Police on digital services in development designed to support survivors. We have also developed partnerships with a number of international Governments to help them in the design and process of setting up their own tech abuse services and support in sharing best practice.
2024 also saw the introduction of our much-anticipated Digital Lead Role which has introduced improvements to our tech safety website including review and edits to improve accessibility of our website. We have seen the website continue to expand in people visiting with numbers soaring to 9.9k per month. This role has also allowed us to launch our very own tech safety newsletter, released monthly (you can sign up here) and also our Podcasts that allow us to highlight emerging and raise awareness of emerging tech issues along with showcasing some of our partner by-and-for agencies supporting survivors. Listen to our podcasts on Spotify, here. All of our Podcasts are available in British Sign Language, you must be logged in to view videos on Spotify.
Emma Pickering, Head of the Technology Facilitated Abuse Team, and the National Domestic Abuse Helpline launched her Churchill Fellowship report in April 2024. With Emma receiving a commendation for her work at the Churchill event in September 2024.
We have engaged with Emmerdale writers to help develop a storyline that focused on coercive control and provide real life examples of how technology can be misused to track and monitor a victim. This storyline provided us with the opportunity to feed in examples of how both technology and online financial platforms can be misused by an abuser. Helping raise awareness and signposting survivors to our National Domestic Abuse Helpline for ongoing support.
Refuge’s Policy Team have also been supported by the Technology Facilitated Abuse Team supporting legislative asks and campaigns including a campaign for improved legislation to safeguard survivors of intimate image-based abuse. You can read more and sign the petition here: Sign GLAMOUR's Petition To Stop Image-Based Abuse
Sadly, I couldn’t possibly include everything that the team has achieved over the last year in such a short article, but I hope you enjoy reading these highlights as much as I have enjoyed reflecting and writing about them. It certainly reminds me of the reasons I remain so proud to work as part of the team. As we enter 2025, we remain committed to continue to raise awareness of both technology-facilitated abuse and economic abuse. Working in partnership with agencies across the sector to create safer technology and drive legislative change to hold perpetrators to account. This work does not come without its challenges, and we value the commitment from you supporting our work. Please do continue to share our content, encourage your networks to sign up to our newsletters, join our training sessions. To help ensure that both online and physical spaces are safer for women and girls.
Wishing you all a peaceful Christmas and New year.