Dr Emma Quilty joins Byte Into IT to break down her study on the rise of gender-based violence and abuse through technology, specifically in the Pacific Islands. They unpack how culture, religion and geography shape the violence itself and the response to it, and delve deeper into what’s getting in the way of people seeking help.

The study which was conducted across the Indo-Pacific, spoke to front-line practitioners across Fiji, Kiribati, Micronesia, Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and dissects the types of abuses that occur, including controlling access to a person’s device, sharing or threatening to share intimate images without permission often to an individual’s family or faith-based networks, monitoring another person’s location without consent, and creating or threatening to create sexualised AI generated images.

Dr Emma Quilty is a social anthropologist who works in the field of feminist science and technology studies. She is also a research fellow for the Centre For Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.