Apps Can't Fix Gender Violence Alone, Swedish Study Warns

<p>Mobile applications against gender-based violence are a global and growing phenomenon, with hundreds of apps available in the international market. In this article, we analyze how apps and digital technologies are discursively construed as measures against (gender-based) intimate partner violence in marketing and media coverage of three Swedish businesses and their digital tools aiming to combat and prevent violence. Focusing on sociotechnical imaginaries about the potential of technology, we analyze how the intersection between digital technology, innovation culture, and feminism affects the understanding of violence as a social problem and what type of solutions that become desirable. We do so by first scrutinizing how the selected apps’ technical functions are represented. These representations emphasize, first, a need for more, objective, and data-driven information about the nature and extent of violence, among both help-seekers and supporting institutions, and, second, the apps’ potential as tools for help-seeking and self-care, partly akin to mental health apps. While we share the conviction that digital communication can be a useful tool for help-seeking, we argue that the representations of these technical functions as solving the problem with gendered violence (a claim accentuated by the competition driven innovation context), produce a simplified and post-ideological understanding of the persistence of violence, as rooted in a lack of individual and professional insights and risk-assessments. Simultaneously, the risks of bias and increased surveillance associated with user data analyses, often perpetuating structural inequalities, are left unmentioned, something we conclusively argue is highly important for future studies and uses of technology against gendered violence.</p>