Source: Radio New Zealand
Experts say there is an increase in abusive partners stalking their exes with small tracking devices. 123RF
Domestic violence experts warn they are seeing an alarming increase in abusive partners stalking their exes using mini tracking devices and mobile phone apps.
The social service Help at Hand, funds technology to help reduce family violence and its general manager Gavin Healy said the majority of the refuges they deal with report tracking devices are a problem.
“They’re being found everywhere, they’re being found slipped in handbags, kids teddies if they know there’s a toy the kid brings everywhere with them they’ll stick it in there, back of the car,” he said.
Help at Hand general manager Gavin Healy SUPPLIED
“We’ve also come across a situation where someone had access to the PlayStation and was actually able to turn the camera on the other side to see what was going on when the kids were playing.”
Healy said in a recent survey of 778 survivors of domestic voilence, 38 percent were fearful their former partner was tracking them digitally and 20 percent reported their ex had taken control of their social media, bank accounts or codes.
He said digital tracking was also occurring via phone apps.
“We’re just getting our heads around it and the perpetrators are streaks ahead but the data’s definitely there to show that this is becoming a really significant issue.”
Healy said Help at Hand was in the initial stages of working with organisations on the frontline to help them identify and reduce digital tracking.
Eclipse aims to prevent family violence and train those working in the sector, its director Debbs Murray is herself a survivor of domestic violence.
Debbs Murray, author of One Soul, One Survivor supplied
She said they began offering a technology family violence workshop mid-2025 because of the prevalence of digital harm.
“We’re actively training our frontline now about it…It is a whole new form of coercive control in itself, it’s brutal.”
She said mini tracking devices were used but so were everyday household devices.
“Anything that can be controlled by an app can be used as a form of coercive control or family violence tactics,” Murray said.
“If you imagine that the primary victim’s sitting in their home and suddenly the curtains start opening and closing or the wifi’s shut down or the power’s turned off.”
She said children’s toys could be used to track whereabouts, and pets.
“I heard a story about a woman who was tracked down by her predominant aggressor through a microchip in a cat,” Murray said.
“Anything that’s got cameras on it, children’s toys there’s pet dispensers that have cameras on that can be used to surveil and monitor. It’s so big.”
Women’s Refuge this year found more than 80 percent of people using their services had experienced digital abuse through their phones and other technology and 56 percent had been tracked and had their movements monitored.
Its principal policy advisor Dr Natalie Thorburn said mobile phone apps were most commonly used.
“While occasionally we do have perpetrators who will use things like air tags or other associated GPS technology that are separate from their phones to stalk, to monitor, to keep an eye on their victims, most of the time it actually happens just as effectively using everyday technology,” she said.
“The apps you already have on your phone, the ones that you use on a regular basis, those things are actually far more likely to be maliciously utilised by perpetrators than any of the new technology.”
Thorburn said it was concerning.
“As our lives become increasingly digitally mediated, so does the forms of violence that we experience so it’s the same kind of violence, but just enacted through a different mechanism,” she said.
“It does make perpetrators’ ways of abusing people more efficient and give them greater reach and that’s kind of the terrifying part of it.”
Legislation to make stalking a specific criminal offence has passed its third reading in Parliament and will come into force in May 2026.
The legislation amends the Crimes Act to make stalking and harassment punishable by up to five years in prison.
“The new stalking law will make it a lot easier to identify those examples of tracking, monitoring, spying behaviour basically as stalking, especially in an intimate partner scenario where there’s reason to be fearful of someone’s response,” Thorburn said.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
