Domestic Violence in the Digital Age: Investigating the Role of Smart Home Technologies.

The context of the research:
The misuse of technologies, especially in the context of sexual and domestic violence, is increasing. According to Refuge (2020), 72% of women accessing its services reported experiences of technology-facilitated abuse. Conventional technologies, including smartphones and social media, can be exploited to harass victims.

The growing adoption of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including internet-enabled doorbells and voice assistants, may provide perpetrators with a more sophisticated range of tools for abuse. Evidence indicates that perpetrators can harass and gaslight victims by remotely controlling utility and security systems (Faria, 2020).

Presently, data is lacking on the scale and scope of IoT-facilitated abuse, which makes it difficult to implement pathways for harm minimisation. Support services and charities also report a lack of awareness and resources necessary to cope with IoT-facilitated abuse. Therefore, the challenges posed by smart home technologies, in the context of domestic violence, require urgent consideration.

Aims and objectives:
Given the lack of knowledge in this field, one objective is to take a broad approach and investigate the role of smart home technologies from a variety of perspectives. Thus, my key objectives are to:

1. Consider how risks and potential harms of smart home technologies are defined and perceived by the general public.

2. Understand the scale of IoT-facilitated abuse and the lived experience of victims.

3. Investigate the strategies employed by perpetrators to enact domestic violence using smart home technologies.

4. Reduce the scope for smart home devices to be weaponised for harm through principles of responsible innovation.

I plan to use the following methods to investigate these areas:

1. An online survey of awareness and perceptions of IoT-facilitated abuse, disseminated to the general public. I will use my on-going collaboration with Ofcom to access a wider population. I plan to conduct a pilot study to ensure the proposed questions are appropriate.

2. Scraping online, public forums in which (potential) perpetrators discuss and share strategies for IoT-facilitated abuse.

3. Co-creation studies with experts and victims, drawing upon their lived experiences, to inform the safe and secure use of IoT devices. This method was selected as it is widely used for researching sensitive topics, including abuse (Leitão, 2019). I will co-ordinate these workshops with local support groups to overcome potential recruitment difficulties.

Potential applications and benefits:
My project draws on multiple perspectives, which enables a greater understanding of this emerging space and increases potential applications. I anticipate that my project will:

1. Raise awareness of the different dimensions of harm and vulnerability in the smart home ecosystem.

2. Increase safety outcomes for consumers, particularly those more vulnerable to harm.

3. Inform the development of design principles and guides to reduce the scope for smart home devices to be weaponised as a tool of domestic violence.

Relevance to the research council:
My project is relevant to the EPSRC as themes of trust, privacy and security are key to improving our understanding of IoT-facilitated abuse. I will apply principles of responsible innovation (as stipulated by the EPSRC) in co-creation workshops and ethical considerations of devices.

Who will benefit?

The inter-disciplinary doctoral graduates trained within the CDT will play a key role in addressing the acute shortage of highly skilled workers in this area, hence meeting industry and government needs. The research they will conduct in the CDT and their future work will strongly impact industry, government, academia and society. Industrial applications cover those involving large-scale, socio-technical infrastructures where resilience-at-scale is a fundamental need, such as, intelligent transportation, finance, digital healthcare, energy generation & distribution and advanced manufacturing. The globally unique capacity focusing on TIPS-at-Scale will position the UK as a world-leader, offering major economic benefits by ensuring that the UK is a safe place in which to do business, and social benefits in terms of security and privacy of the individual.

More specifically, the CDT's research and training programme will provide graduates with capabilities to address socio-technical challenges of TIPS-at-Scale, including understanding of user and adversarial behaviours. This is of major importance to digital infrastructure providers, government agencies and law enforcement agencies. This is in addition to the wider business and health sectors where the protection of data and the physical processes controlled by large-scale infrastructure is vital. Research on resilience in partially-trusted environments will lead to new architectures and new technologies to significantly enhance integrity and resilience, including new authentication methods and trust models. Research on empirically-grounded assurances for TIPS will break new ground by providing new interdisciplinary techniques and design principles to underpin infrastructures of the future. Last, but by no means least, by embedding Responsible Innovation into the programme throughout, the CDT ensures that TIPS-at-Scale approaches take a values-based view that considers TIPS across the full lifecycle of digital infrastructures: from conception to design, implementation and deployment through to maintenance, evolution and decommissioning. Such a Responsible Innovation approach will benefit society-at-large.

How will they benefit?

There is a critical need within the UK for a new breed of researchers and future leaders, equipped with a breadth of interdisciplinary skills to tackle TIPS issues at play in future infrastructures and a depth of knowledge, drawing upon interdisciplinary skills, to develop novel and innovative solutions to address TIPS-at-Scale. The CDT will produce a pipeline of such researchers and leaders trained to PhD level. It will build on very strong existing links with organisations such as Vodafone, Google, HP, Airbus , Thales, Symantec, IBM, Babcock, NCC Group, Altran, Wessex Water, Cybernetica and Embecosm, all of which have contributed to co-creation of the CDT and are committed to close engagement with it. Both universities will use their business development teams to further engage with these and other relevant organisations. Major opportunities for generating economic and societal benefits exist with the planned Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus of University of Bristol (due to open in 2021) - with a focus on co-creation of a suite of PG training programmes with industry - and the Bath Innovation Centre. The CDT will also leverage the various impact channels of the three EPSRC-NCSC Research Institutes, the PETRAS Hub and the CREST Centre in which the two Universities play a major role. Both universities already have research and PhD studentships directly funded by industry and agencies such as DSTL, NCSC and GCHQ as well as iCASE awards hence close relationships already exist to maximise impact. The CDT will also organise public debates and social media campaigns to encourage public participation and shaping of TIPS-at-scale discussions and solutions.