Safe Harbors: Revisiting Battered Women’s Experiences with Abusers Placed on EM

• In Event: Criminal Justice System's Response to Violence Against Children, Women, and Intimate Partners

Abstract

GPS technology has altered how women whose alleged batterers are placed on electronic monitoring (EM) experience their sense of safety. Whereas prior work on EM programs for domestic violence (DV) that was RF-based (Erez and Ibarra, 2007) noted that technology could usher in a heightened sense of safety and spirit of “re-entry” into civil society for victims, the turn toward GPS-based EM for DV programs has meant a more fragmented experience for victims, including a lessened sense of certainty about one’s safety, despite the enhanced tracking capabilities of GPS technology. This paper compares findings from interviews with female victims exposed to programs with different technological bases, finding that GPS-involved victims (N=34) are likelier to reference concerns about the level of protection they can assume in everyday life, and describe diminished confidence in the technology’s power to deter partners from attempting to contact them. The diminished subjective sense of safety seems to stem from less extensive interaction between victims and system personnel that is associated with tracking technology, rather than the “properties” of the technology per se. Implications of the findings for how to influence victims’ sense of safety through the use of technology in domestic violence cases are discussed.

Authors

• Edna Erez, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Peter Ibarra, University of Illinois at Chicago