Research knowledge base for GBV questions, methods, and service pathways

Intimate partner violence refers to abuse by a current or former intimate partner that causes physical, sexual, psychological, or economic harm. It often includes controlling behaviour, intimidation, coercion, and repeated attempts to dominate a partner.

Femicide is the intentional killing of a woman or girl because she is a woman or girl. It is one of the most extreme forms of gender-based violence and is often linked to prior patterns of abuse, coercion, or gendered power and control.

Technology-facilitated abuse happens when digital tools are used to threaten, stalk, shame, monitor, blackmail, or control someone. It can include spyware, tracking, impersonation, non-consensual sharing of intimate material, cyberbullying, and hacking accounts.

Examples include sextortion, image-based abuse, doxxing, cyberbullying, online sexual harassment, cyberstalking, online grooming, hacking, hate speech, impersonation, and the use of technology to locate or monitor survivors. These are not minor digital nuisances; they can be forms of coercion and violence.

Human trafficking is the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of a person through coercion, deception, force, abuse of vulnerability, or similar means for the purpose of exploitation. It is a crime that can affect people of any gender, age, or background.

TEARS describes technology-facilitated GBV as abuse, harassment, control, or exploitation carried out through digital tools. In practice this can include stalking, impersonation, doxxing, non-consensual intimate-image sharing, electronic surveillance, blackmail, and AI-generated sexual humiliation.

Rape Crisis uses the F.O.U.R. framework to describe stalking patterns as Fixed, Obsessive, Unwanted, and Repetitive. The framework helps show that stalking is usually not one isolated interaction, but a pattern of escalating entitlement, intrusion, and control.

TEARS Foundation defines reproductive coercion as interference with a partner's reproductive choices, such as forcing pregnancy or undermining their ability to control contraception. It is useful to name because it helps survivors recognise abuse that may not initially look like violence in the narrow sense.

TEARS Foundation describes victim-blaming as holding the survivor responsible for the abuse while minimising or ignoring the perpetrator's role. It is harmful because it deepens shame, discourages disclosure, and shifts responsibility away from the person who chose to commit the violence.

Local centres such as Saartjie Baartman stress that leaving abuse can be dangerous and often requires planning. Guidance around safety planning, preparing key items, and protecting digital privacy helps survivors reduce risk during one of the most vulnerable points in the abuse cycle.

Survivor guidance from Rape Crisis stresses that clothing and other physical evidence can help document what happened if a survivor later chooses to pursue a case. Preserving evidence is not about proving worthiness for care; it is about keeping options open while the survivor regains control.

Rape Crisis centres belief as a direct answer to rape culture and victim-blaming. Hearing 'we believe you' matters because many survivors arrive carrying doubt, shame, and social blame, and trustworthy support begins by locating responsibility with the perpetrator rather than the survivor.

Rape Crisis support guidance centres three core actions: listen, believe, and let the survivor say what they need. Support works best when it is survivor-led rather than driven by the helper's panic, assumptions, or need to take control.

Rape Crisis support guidance suggests avoiding interruption, judgment, and the urge to take over the survivor's decisions. A supportive response is not about forcing a plan; it is about helping the survivor regain agency and control.

Warning signs can include monitoring movements, demanding passwords, isolating someone from friends or work, accusing them constantly, humiliating them, threatening harm, damaging property, forcing sex, or using digital tools to track and control them. Abuse is not limited to physical assault; it can also be psychological, economic, sexual, and technology-enabled.

UNODC says traffickers target people in difficult or marginalised circumstances, including undocumented migrants, people desperate for work, children from extremely poor households, and people with little protection or support. Vulnerability, not weakness, is what traffickers exploit.

UNODC lists sexual exploitation, forced labour, forced criminal activity, forced marriage, begging, organ removal, and other exploitative practices. This is useful in GBV work because trafficking can overlap with sexual violence, coercive control, and abuse inside homes or workplaces.

UNODC says traffickers use technology across the whole chain, including recruitment through social media, fake job ads, deception, and profit movement. This matters because a seemingly ordinary online message, advert, or romance approach can become part of exploitation.

Government and global frameworks both connect economic empowerment to lower vulnerability and stronger options for leaving abuse. Financial dependence can trap survivors in dangerous situations, so economic support is part of prevention and recovery, not a separate issue.

TEARS explains that online abuse often blurs into physical-world danger, fear, and isolation. Technology can carry abuse into a survivor's home, work, school, and relationships, which is why digital safety and physical safety cannot be treated as separate issues.

Rape Crisis says stalking is often misread as affection or someone who simply cares too much, but it is actually about power, entitlement, and control. When contact is unwanted and repeated, it is a violation of boundaries rather than a sign of love.

Rape Crisis explains that stalking can function as grooming, intimidation, retaliation, or ongoing coercion in the context of sexual violence. It reinforces the message that a survivor's boundaries do not matter and can create a climate where silence feels safer than resistance.

Rape Crisis places these behaviours in the middle of the rape culture pyramid to show they are not harmless misunderstandings. They are real violations of autonomy and dignity and often function as warning signs inside broader patterns of coercion and abuse.

Rape Crisis' counselling writing presents healing as something made up of many small moments of truth, vulnerability, and courage rather than a single endpoint. This framing helps counter the pressure survivors may feel to recover quickly or in a neat, linear way.