Technology helps women victims of violence

The White House report "Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being" contained a lot of good news, among it: education gains across all racial and ethnic groups, increased life expectancy, and a decreased probability of being a victim of violent crime. But the specter of violent crime underscored many of the report's more grim findings, among them the intractable stain of domestic violence, or, as professionals now describe it, "intimate partner violence," or IVP.

While nonfatal IPV has declined by 50 percent since the Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994, one number has remained steady: the small percentage of violence that is reported, much less prosecuted. From 2004 to 2008, victims of rape -- either committed by strangers or not -- came forward only about half the time, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. And victims of IVP come forward even more rarely, though IVP accounts for more than a quarter of ALL acts of violence against women. Putting that starkly: If a woman has been brutalized, there is a one-in-four chance that she didn't just know the person who did it, but knew them well.

Advances in technology have played a part in bringing down the rate of many other violent crimes, in large part due to the increasing likelihood of successful conviction. IVP rates have not been affected as much by the advances brought by DNA typing, facial-recognition software and data mining. Those tools, as useful as they are in identifying criminals, have not helped prosecutors and police overcome the largest hurdles in bringing IVP abusers to justice: underreporting and, even after a crime is reported, the reluctance of victims to pursue charges. In facing these two challenges, however, activists and officials have begun using technology that is far more quotidian, even boring: instant messaging (as antique as the Internet, really) and digital voice recording of phone calls (as familiar as the answering machine).

The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, for instance, has pioneered the use of text-message and online counseling for victims, which is especially valuable in reaching out to those whose abusers live in the same home -- where making a phone call unobserved is impossible, or where the victim feels too ashamed or too scared to even leave the home. (RAINN's National Sexual Assault Online Hotline can be found at https://ohl.rainn.org/online.) RAINN officials say that the online hotline program draws a greater number of reports every time they manage to add volunteers: "Demand always equals supply," said a RAINN official. "The more resources we put into this, the more reporting we see."

In New York City, as reported by William Glaberson in the New York Times, domestic-violence prosecutors are having unexpected success with the routine taping of prisoner phone calls. The city started digitally recording such calls in 2008, and since last year it's recorded all the calls made to and from accused individuals in holding before trial, except conversations with their doctors or lawyers. These calls have helped the district attorney's office in all sorts of crimes, but only in cases of IPV do prosecutors get the chance to listen to calls between the person accused of a crime and that person's alleged victim.

That most alleged abusers violate protective orders by simply making such a call is helpful to prosecutors in and of itself, but what's changed the way IPV cases are prosecuted is what the abusers say. They cajole, they wheedle, they threaten. In short, they exhibit in real time the very pattern of abuse that put them in jail in the first place. Using these recordings, prosecutors can often succeed in getting a guilty verdict even if the victim ultimately winds up staying away from the witness stand.

The humble instant-message screen, the stealthy omnipresence of digital recording: in many instances, these technologies contribute to the homogenization, even anonymization, of our social networks. But in the hands of IPV volunteers and professionals, they don't blur the outlines of individual members of society, they help define them.

Ana Marie Cox is the founding editor of the political blog Wonkette and is the Washington correspondent for GQ magazine.