If we’re serious about ending violence against women and children in Australia, then we must address the ways systems, technology and culture work to dehumanise women long before violence becomes visible.
Violence against women is baked into the systems women move through every day: from workplaces and media environments to social media platforms, dating apps and the stories we continue to tell about masculinity, entitlement and power.
Recently, a friend told me about a man she had met on a dating app six months ago. They had been on a handful of dates. Nothing serious. Then, five months after she told him to stop contacting her, he began appearing outside her house. Leaving presents at the door. Not knocking. Not announcing himself. Just enough to let her know he had been there. Quietly implying he knew where she lived, when she was home, that she was being watched.
When she reported the behaviour to police, she was told no serious offence had occurred. He hadn’t assaulted her and hadn’t explicitly threatened her. There was nothing they could do. They indicated they would contact him, but systems made locating and connecting with this person difficult.
Importantly, she knew something was wrong. Women know these feelings intimately. We make estimates daily to stay safe. We text friends when we arrive home and share the locations of our dates with friends. We screenshot profiles and send them to trusted contacts “just in case”. Increasingly, women ask potential partners for identifying information before meeting them. The onus of the labour to remain safe sits squarely on women.
Research shows this behaviour is not irrational. According to Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), coercive control, stalking and technology-facilitated abuse are among the strongest predictors of future intimate partner violence and homicide. Studies consistently show that women often identify danger long before institutions do, because women are trained through lived experience to recognise patterns of escalation.
When my friend raised her concerns with a male family member, he dismissed her. “Don’t be paranoid,” he said. “Nothing’s happened.”
That sentence captures the gulf between women’s lived reality and the systems supposedly designed to protect us.
For many men, danger only becomes real once violence is visible. But women understand that coercion, intimidation, stalking and fear are themselves forms of violence. We understand the warning signs because we are forced to read them constantly.
This is why Prime Mininster Anthony Albanese’s recent comment that his government was “throwing everything” at the issue of violence against women felt so off the mark. We are not “throwing everything” at the problem if we still fundamentally fail to understand how women experience danger and how structurally embedded misogyny is.
In Australia, one woman is killed every nine days by a current or former intimate partner. Yet long before these deaths occur, there are often repeated warning signs: stalking, obsessive communication, monitoring, emotional abuse, threats, financial control, humiliation and isolation. These behaviours are not peripheral to violence. They are the architecture of it. And increasingly, that architecture is digital.
My own work focuses on dating apps and intimacy. In my focus groups conducted in 2020, every woman reported experiencing some form of technology-facilitated abuse. Many had been stalked. Several had reported concerns to police or dating platforms and received little meaningful response. Their experiences were treated as isolated incidents rather than part of a broader ecosystem of misogyny and coercive control.
Internationally, the statistics are equally alarming. Research from the Pew Research Center found women under 35 are disproportionately targeted by online harassment, stalking and sexualised abuse. Other studies have identified dating apps as significant sites of image-based abuse, location tracking, impersonation and harassment, particularly for women, queer people and gender-diverse users. Worse still at points of intersection, vulnerability and marginality.
The reality is that many dating apps still prioritise engagement and profit over safety by design. Reporting mechanisms are opaque. Identity verification remains inconsistent. Women who report stalking, harassment or abuse often describe their complaints disappearing into a void. Platforms rely heavily on reactive moderation, intervening only after harm has already occurred.
There is still no comprehensive, nationally accessible system that allows women to identify repeat perpetrators across platforms. Meanwhile, harmful behaviours are minimised until they escalate into catastrophe.
That is what we are dealing with: not isolated acts, but interconnected systems.
Violence against women does not emerge from nowhere. It is reinforced culturally, socially and technologically every single day.
Reality television continues to mainstream misogyny as entertainment. Influencers within the manosphere openly promote domination, humiliation and entitlement toward women to millions of young boys and men. Social media algorithms reward outrage, grievance and extremist content because anger drives engagement. Dating platforms replicate power imbalances while offering little accountability. Popular culture still romanticises persistence, jealousy and control as signs of male desire rather than warning signs.
These systems feed each other. They normalise the idea that women exist to obey, accommodate and absorb male anger. They teach men that rejection is humiliation and that women’s boundaries are negotiable. By the time violence becomes physical, the groundwork has often been laid.
And yet public responses continue to focus almost exclusively on aftermath rather than prevention. We cannot arrest our way out of misogyny. We cannot fund our way out of violence while leaving intact the cultural narratives that sustain it.
Safety must be embedded by design – in technology, education, media and policy.
It also means acknowledging that misogyny itself has become increasingly networked, algorithmic and profitable. We are now dealing with industrialised forms of gendered hatred amplified at scale through digital systems designed to maximise engagement rather than social wellbeing.
Because women are already telling us what danger feels like. We are already mapping the patterns. We know the fear of walking home alone, the dread of seeing an unexpected car outside the house, the instinctive tightening in the chest when someone refuses to accept a boundary. The problem is not that we are failing to “throw everything” at violence against women. The problem is that we still refuse to see the whole picture and acknowledge the systematisation of misogyny.