The new Panopticon: Women’s experiences of mobile phone- mediated coercive control within abusive relationships

Domestic abuse is believed to affect 30% of women worldwide and smartphone ownership is now estimated to exceed the three billion mark. Mobile and smart phones offer perpetrators new and extended opportunities for surveillance and coercive control in their intimate relationships, but there is limited knowledge and theorisation about these impacts on survivors. Semi-structured interviews with 12 heterosexual women living in refuges in the UK revealed that the ubiquity and portability of mobile phones leaves women feeling permanently visible to abusive and coercively controlling partners. This chapter considers the participants’ responses through a Foucauldian lens. We suggest the ‘agile technological surveillance’ facilitated by smartphones creates a Panopticon effect that caused the participants in this study to regulate their behaviour and conform to their partner’s requirements even when he was not physically present. This could be viewed as a ‘training’ that results in survivors behaving like ‘docile bodies’ and ‘efficient machines’. Practitioners are encouraged to recognise these responses as protective adaptations that can last long after the abuse has ended and to support women in identifying and unpicking these causal links.