The Navigating Tech Abuse Toolkit is a resource for frontline workers in domestic violence shelters in northern, remote, rural, and Indigenous (RRNI) communities. It covers the most common types of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) faced by survivors in these communities, as identified through a survey of RRNI shelters.
In this toolkit, you will find a series of conversation guides that you can use when working with survivors. Each guide focuses on a separate type of tech-facilitated violence and explains what that specific type of TFGBV looks like in real life. It includes conversation prompts to help you and the survivor understand what is happening, along with strategies to increase their safety and help them use technology with confidence.
This toolkit also includes a brief document explaining the four key principles of tech safety planning. We encourage you to read it before starting your safety planning conversations with survivors.
Your Safety, Your Voice is a pre-recorded video series for survivors to watch with their support workers to identify tech abuse, make informed decisions about next steps and determine which safety strategies work best for their situation.
Support workers can use these resources along with the safety planning skills they already use and the tech safety tools at www.techsafety.ca. This toolkit is here to help workers talk to survivors about tech-related abuse and suggest safety tips for different situations. It’s not a complete safety planning guide, but it adds to the safety strategies your program already has.
Though the content of this toolkit is up to date at the time of publishing, we know that technology is constantly emerging and changing. We encourage you to regularly check for updated information.
Word of Caution: This toolkit is available as read-only on this website with an option to download the PDF versions of each document. If you are reading this toolkit on a device that may be monitored by your abuser, do not download the PDF versions as they will automatically save in your downloads folder. If you think that someone is monitoring your phone, use a different device that the person cannot access (and that they have not had access to in the past), such as computer at a library or a friend's phone. You can also use sheltersafe.ca to find a shelter/transition house near you to discuss options with an anti-violence worker.