Understanding the measurable risk posed by technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse and the appropriate safeguarding responses.

The project seeks to quantify the risk posed by technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse (TF-IPA) by developing a measurable tool or resources that will be applicable to services supporting or related to service users experiencing this harm.

Present safeguarding practices within sectors supporting victim/survivors have not isolated nor quantified the impacts of TF-IPA.
To create a measurement, historical records will be reviewed in the form of Domestic Homicide Reviews and Near Miss Reports to quantify the proximity, frequency and presentation of TF-IPA within risk escalating abuse experiences.

Risk assessments such as the DASH, DARA, S-DASH and others, alongside the theory underpinning these measurement tools will be reviewed in line with the findings drawn from the report analyses.

Statements will subsequently be made in terms of the risk posed by TF-IPA and the gaps in current agency responses.

The project will aim to provide resources and recommended safeguarding practices. This will be focused upon a multitude of services that connect directly or indirectly with service users. Outcomes are hoped to support the generation of informed decisions by commissioning bodies, policy making, technology developers and case workers, when addressing the harm of TF-IPA.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.