Hidden in the feed: How technology-facilitated abuse harms migrant communities

Each year, the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence calls on governments, organisations and communities to confront the drivers of violence and build safer communities.

Increasingly, one of the most urgent spaces for action is the digital world. While technology enables connection, work and participation, it also creates avenues for control, particularly for those navigating life in a new country.

For many migrants, smartphones, apps and online platforms are central to everyday survival. Digital tools are essential for finding work, communicating with family overseas, accessing services, navigating transport, and managing immigration processes.

However, this dependence also creates opportunities for violence. Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) is now a significant, yet often overlooked, form of gender-based violence affecting migrant communities.

During the 16 Days of Activism, recognising these unique digital vulnerabilities is crucial for meaningful prevention and support.

Why technology-facilitated abuse uniquely affects migrants

TFA includes tactics such as the monitoring of devices, installing spyware, demanding passwords, impersonation, stalking through GPS, and threatening to share private images. For migrants, these behaviours are shaped and intensified by structural factors such as visa insecurity, language barriers, limited social networks and unfamiliarity with local support systems.

For most women, digital tools are essential, but for this group, they’re lifelines. Their deep reliance on technology means that when abuse occurs online, the impact is immediate and far-reaching.

Threats related to immigration status, prevention of contact with family overseas, or monitoring through culturally specific apps can create a powerful sense of fear and entrapment.

The 16 Days campaign urges us to address the systemic roots of gender-based violence, such as gender inequality and racism. Understanding how digital, cultural and migration-related pressures intersect is an essential part of that work.

Transnational abuse: Violence that crosses borders

Technology has fundamentally reshaped the geography of intimate partner and family violence. For migrants, abuse is rarely contained within the borders of the country in which they currently live. Instead, it often becomes transnational, occurring simultaneously in Australia and in the country of origin.

This cross-border dynamic is one of the most complex, and least understood, dimensions of TFA.

Digital technologies allow abusive partners, family members or community networks overseas to maintain ongoing surveillance, exert pressure, or intervene in a person's life from afar. Video calls, messaging apps, community chat groups, social media and encrypted platforms can create continuous channels through which expectations, demands and scrutiny can flow.

For many migrants, especially women from community-focused cultures, these international ties provide vital connections. Yet they can also become vectors for coercion.

For example:

• Family members overseas may demand daily “proof of safety” through video calls, which can function as monitoring rather than care

• Ex-partners abroad may spread misinformation through group chats or social media, damaging reputations and threatening family honour

• Community elders or extended relatives may police behaviour, from clothing choices to social interactions, by observing online posts or group activity

• Perpetrators may threaten to contact family overseas with allegations or private information, knowing this could trigger shame, stigma, or social exclusion

• Coordination may occur transnationally among perpetrators and their families, using digital tools to isolate or manipulate the victim-survivor, even when physically separated.

Surrounded by abuse

Crucially, in these situations the victim-survivor is effectively surrounded by abuse, not only from a single individual but through a networked social environment that spans countries. This can make the violence feel omnipresent and inescapable.

Immigration status adds a complex layer. Perpetrators may threaten to hurt relatives, lie to employers or authorities abroad, or use information from homeland digital systems (such as social media, government portals or banking apps) to intimidate or coerce.

When someone’s safety or family stability is tied to relationships in multiple countries, the consequences of these threats are amplified.

This cross-border control also disrupts traditional escape pathways. Physical separation, often presented as a primary safety strategy, may not bring relief if digital surveillance, reputational attacks or family pressure continue from thousands of kilometres away.

Leaving an abusive relationship in Australia may require confronting not only the partner here, but entire familial or community networks elsewhere.

Because transnational abuse is often carried out through platforms specific to particular linguistic or cultural communities, such as WhatsApp, Telegram or Viber, Australian services may be less familiar with the dynamics and features of these apps. This can lead to misrecognition of risk, underestimation of harm, or advice that does not translate effectively across cultural contexts.

For migrants, digital space is simultaneously a site of connection, identity, obligation and surveillance. Understanding this transnational landscape is essential for any meaningful response to TFA and must be central to the structural reforms advocated during the 16 Days of Activism.

Barriers to support

Despite growing awareness of digital safety, migrants experiencing TFA face distinct obstacles.

• Language barriers: Most digital-safety resources are in English and assume familiarity with popular platforms in Australia, creating significant access gaps

• Fear of institutions: Uncertainty about visa rights, coupled with past negative experiences with authorities in home countries, can discourage reporting

• Cultural stigma: Expectations regarding family loyalty, privacy or honour can be reinforced through online networks, intensifying pressure to remain silent.

• Social isolation: New arrivals may lack trusted local networks, making it harder to identify abuse or navigate services.

These intersecting factors mean TFA often remains hidden, and its impacts underestimated.

What needs to change – and how the 16 Days can drive action

The 16 Days of Activism is not only for awareness but for commitments to structural reform. Building migrant-inclusive digital safety requires approaches that reflect cultural diversity and lived experience.

Community-embedded digital safety education should be delivered through settlement agencies, multicultural organisations and bilingual workers so that guidance is culturally informed and aligned with migrants’ everyday digital practices.

Multilingual digital literacy initiatives need to go beyond basic device use to include privacy management, recognising warning signs, and responding to online threats.

Clear safeguards against immigration-related coercion are also essential, including stronger protections regarding access to online visa accounts and better communication of rights for temporary visa holders to reduce opportunities for exploitation.

Frontline and specialist services require training that helps practitioners understand transnational abuse patterns, culturally specific platforms, and the ways digital coercion intersects with migration.

At the same time, technology companies must be held accountable for improving translated safety resources, simplifying reporting processes and designing features that limit surveillance and coercion on platforms widely used by migrant communities.

Towards digital safety for all

TFA is a growing form of gender-based violence, one that is especially harmful when layered with the challenges of migration. If the 16 Days of Activism is to advance meaningful prevention, digital safety must be recognised as integral to gender equality and human rights.

Migrants contribute richly to Australia’s cultural, social and economic life. Ensuring they can use technology safely, without fear of surveillance or coercion, is essential to building inclusive, violence-free communities.