The Domestic Battlefield

Here’s an uncomfortable truth for security professionals: In Australia, someone falls victim to cybercrime every six minutes—but police are called to a family violence dispute every four minutes.

We spend billions protecting critical infrastructure from cyberattacks, yet the most pervasive and insidious forms of harm—family violence, coercive control, financial exploitation, human trafficking, workplace abuse, and digital surveillance—are still treated as private issues, not security threats.

These aren’t separate problems. They are interconnected forms of abuse, driven by power imbalances, economic instability, technological exploitation, and systemic failures. They shape public safety, economic resilience, and national security—yet they remain poorly understood, inconsistently addressed, and often dismissed.

If we want to understand why we need a better response, we first need to acknowledge how abuse is evolving—and why extremism, exploitation, and coercion are not fringe problems, and are not independent of one another either.

The 2016 U.S. election shattered the illusion that extremist, reactionary views are rare. Donald Trump’s victory wasn’t just about conservative politics—it exposed deep-seated resentment, nationalism, and authoritarian tendencies that had long existed beneath the surface. That same period saw the rise of alternative media ecosystems, where far-right ideologies thrived. Platforms that don’t need to be named radicalized users at an unprecedented scale, reinforcing misnformation as a political weapon, conspiracy-driven distrust in institutions, anti-government rhetoric and calls for actual violence. 

Trump didn’t create extremism—he validated and amplified views that had already been festering for years.

The same pattern exists with family and intimate partner violence, trafficking, and exploitation. These issues aren’t growing—they were always there. The difference is that technology, economic instability, and social backlash are making them more visible and harder to ignore. 

I speak to the technologists, the security professionals and enthusiasts when I say this, while technology is streamlining our lives, it’s also expanding the ways perpetrators can harm victims. We talk in the security industry about cyber being the new battleground for warfare. The same is true for abuse and exploitation. Technology-Facilitated Abuse (TFA) is rising—and we are indirectly perpetuating it. Every technological advancement, security vulnerability, and bit of data we collect has the potential to be weaponized against victims. 

It is in some cases, a literal matter of life and death.

As security professionals, developers, and policymakers, we need to reframe how we think about data. Privacy is not an inconvenience—it is a protective barrier against exploitation. Every time we build a new platform, device, or AI system, we are generating, storing, and exposing personal data—often with little thought to how it could be used maliciously. We collect data to improve services, enhance user experience, and optimize security, but we rarely stop to ask, what would happen if this got into the hands of the wrong person. Not en-masse, but an individual level. 

The future of security is not AI or Quantum centred, it's human centred - We cannot call ourselves defenders, security professionals, or safety advocates while ignoring the reality that our systems are being weaponised against vulnerable people every day. 

We can't continue to create tools and systems that serve power and enable control without ensuring that they actually protect our most vulnerable. It's about time we asked ourselves, what are we going to do about it?

I know what I’m doing about it. With the help of some incredible individuals, we are building an open source resource designed to identify, track, and define the evolving ways perpetrators exert control. By putting a name to these harms and mapping them against real-world interventions, we aim to bridge the gap between law enforcement, cybersecurity, public health, and frontline services.