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As Domestic Abuse Goes Digital, Shelters Turn To Counter-surveillance With Tor
An anonymous reader writes "Almost every modern abusive relationship has a digital component, from cyberstalking to hacking phones, emails, and social media accounts, but women's shelters increasingly have found themselves on the defensive, ill-equipped to manage and protect their clients from increasingly sophisticated threats. Recently the Tor Project stepped in to help change that. Andrew Lewman, executive director of the project, 'thinks of the digital abuse epidemic like a doctor might consider a biological outbreak. "Step one, do not infect yourself. Step two, do not infect others, especially your co-workers. Step three, help others," he said. In the case of digital infections, like any other, skipping those first two steps can quickly turn caretakers into infected liabilities. For domestic violence prevention organizations that means ensuring their communication lines stay uncompromised. And that means establishing a base level of technology education for staff with generally little to no tech chops who might not understand the gravity of clean communication lines until faced with a situation where their own phone or email gets hacked.'"
Sending a nasty email is not domestic abuse.
Stop trivializing the suffering of women that get beaten within a inch of their lives by brutal husbands.
Psychological abuse is the first step. Why do you think a woman continues to stay with a man who beats her?
And who said that their only concern is psychological abuse? They also need to make sure there isn't a way that
the abuser can't track and/or figure out where the victim is going to be in real life.
If someone is actively hiding something from their spouse because they think their spouse will react negatively to it, then there's a problem with the relationship. However, this doesn't mean that the spouse has a right to see EVERYTHING that person says/does. In the parent's comment, they related the tale of a husband who monitored every cell phone message, Facebook post, and e-mail message his wife made/received. That's not normal behavior. I don't monitor my wife's messages. In fact, I'm not even on Facebook and she is. She could easily be saying nasty things about me there without me knowing. However, I don't demand to see/approve everything she says because I respect her. She's not "property" for me to "manage", she's my spouse and my equal in our relationship.
And lest anything think it only works one way, there are plenty of women who are as controlling as the example above. Either way, if you are demanding to see everything your spouse writes/says, there's a problem in the relationship.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It seems like you have cause and effect backwards, here. Having privacy, even within a married couple, is healthy. There needs to be trust that your spouse isn't going to purposefully do something to harm the relationship. For instance, my wife texts and calls friends, and I generally don't know the content of those conversations. My wife telling me if I ask is trust, and it's healthy. If I demanded access to her E-mail, phone history, etc, that's not healthy, and it wouldn't be her fault if she wanted to maintain a corner of privacy in her life. You can't blame my jealousy and irrationality on her actions.
If I'm being abusive, then I'm not going to want her to find outside help, and I'm not going to want her to talk to her friends about her problems. I'll want to control every aspect of her life. That's the situation we're looking at, not an otherwise-stable relationship with communications issues.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them,".
It's a hard line to draw without sufficient and legally-clear context; for example, consider a facebook/twitter/whatever post addressed to someone, stating "You look lovely today", posted without any further context from someone you know. To an ordinary non-abused person, and many abused persons, this statement is nothing more than a pleasantry. To someone hiding in a battered women's shelter, this could be a direct threat.
You see, abusers are (often) smart enough to not use words that any jury member would immediately recognize as a threatening/abusive gesture.
On the other hand, minus a no-contact restraining order, how do you legally tell the difference in a way that is meaningful? After all, if I said that to some random stranger, and they decide to scream for a cop to lock my ass up... err, what standing is there to do so? Maybe the person in question was raped a day ago and the rapist whispered those words - but I had no clue as to that having ever happened. Saying it may well have hurt the person due to PTSD, but even if I didn't know, there's a legal concept where ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if there were a law that could get me arrested for mental assault (for lack of a better term)...
I guess what I'm getting at is that you have to be damned careful as to where and how much you get the law involved with such things. It's likely much better for all involved that a simple no-contact restraining order draw the line instead, so that only those who the order is leveled against are, well, restrained, and the rest of us can go about our day.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Sending a nasty email is not domestic abuse.
My wife had to put up with an asshole ex-husband who thought the same thing during the early stages of our relationship. He loved to call her up once in a great while and screw with her head - usually after she'd gotten over the last time he called and once he figured out her new phone number. It wasn't until I called him up one day and said two things that he shut up and went away, never to pester her again.
Her personality brightened up a whole hell of a lot more after that, and we've been extremely happy about things ever since.
(...those two things? The first was a recitation of his home address and the hours he was usually home. I'll plead the fifth before I tell you the second one.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Because there aren't shelters filled with abused men and their children they took with them when they escaped the abusive relationship (that I'm aware of). I'm sure that won't stop your miserable whining, though.
Fun fact: That's because there are very few shelters for men.
We've got a couple here in Canada, and they're heavily used. The abuse industry, and I will call it that for good reason has done quite a bit of work pushing the "only men can be abuses" belief. And have pushed it so hard that it's skewed court and family court against men. It of course also doesn't help that there's a huge social stigma on the "the wife/gf/so/etc" beat up the guy. With the "why didn't you stand up for yourself, etc.," bit. Police don't care one way or the other in the case of a domestic here, and try to find the primary person who instigated it. But if the women is the one, there really isn't anywhere for the guy to go.
But let's move onto the homosexual side. Depending on what study you want to cite, the abuse rates between both same sex couples hit as high as 70%, for the women again there's a place they can go to. For the men, not so.
Om, nomnomnom...
Exactly. My wife is free to read my email any time she wants, and vice versa. Can't imagine needing to hide anything. I've also learned there are two sides to every story. Be very careful judging if you've only heard one.
the other side of the story: "my husband thinks he has access to all my email."
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
This ridiculous stereotype that women are abused and men are abusers must stop. It is completely untrue, and simply presented to an accepting society who believe that women are weak and gentle creatures.
Speaking as someone whose first serious partner was an abusive woman - one who knew how to play the people around her - it took me years to gather the strength to get away from her.
She once threw one of her soft toys at me, aiming to hit me with it. When I threw it back, she ran from the room screaming (so she could be heard by others) that I'd promised to never hit her.
She would regularly punch me - just out of the blue - and call it "a love tap." She raped me hundreds of times - six times in a night, once. She was reading daddy-daughter incest porn. If I didn't want sex on a particular morning, she'd accuse me of being gay, or just keep going anyway.
Once upon a time, I commented that a friend of mine had bought her partner a nice watch. My ex- started screaming incoherently at me, then lowered her voice saying that it clearly meant I was in love with this friend, then raised her voice and started shrieking other crap at me. Of course, everyone around came running to her aid, not bothering to work out what was going on.
When I was studying from 8am until 5pm, and then working from 6pm until 9pm, she started demanding that I stop having lunch every day so I could buy her roses.
She then stole $1400 from my bank account.
She later stole my $2000 computer, CD player, a bed, and other assorted items, then sent me the bill for the computer.
That particular group of friends now believe that I used to smack her around a bit, and wouldn't even meet her halfway.
According to the local rape crisis group if those acts were committed against a woman, that is abuse.