For more than two decades, Lorraine* has known her ex-boyfriend is watching her. She cut contact with him 20 years ago, but in Facebook posts and intimidating emails, he makes sure she knows he’s still keeping tabs, from the birth of her children to her most recent wedding anniversary. After years of abuse that resulted in a PTSD diagnosis and intense nightmares, the notes are chilling, and make her uncomfortable putting any personal information in an online space where he could see it.

“It’s affected my relationship with my friends,” Lorraine says. “It’s affected my relationship with my partner. It’s affected my ability to feel safe.”

The advice many survivors like Lorraine receive when they look for help is to leave their online life behind and delete themselves from the internet entirely. There are many tutorials on how to delete your online presence. Given how often abusers use digital channels to harass their targets, erasing yourself can seem like the obvious choice. But interpersonal abuse thrives on the alienation of its victims, and some kind of online presence can be a crucial lifeline for people trying to escape their abusers and rebuild a new life.

Tony Hunt, chief development officer of Operation Safe Escape, a nonprofit organization that helps victims of domestic violence escape their abusers, says deleting yourself from the internet could be exactly what the stalker wants. “It’s about control, they want to isolate you because that gives them absolute control over everything you do,” Hunt explained. “It’s easy to think you need to disappear, but you don’t need to.”

It’s an urgent question for thousands of people quietly struggling with domestic violence. One in four women and one in nine men will experience severe intimate partner physical violence at some point in their lives, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. One in seven women and one in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime, to a point where they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed. A 2015 survey of college students found that nearly 75 percent had experienced some kind of tech-assisted intimate partner victimization in the past year.

For Lorraine, deleting herself from the internet didn’t feel like a solution. “It felt like I was removing my online liberty because of someone else’s abuse,” she said. “Both my husband and I have worked in various countries, so social media is brilliant for keeping in contact with people that we rarely …….

Source: https://www.theverge.com/22812890/domestic-abuse-survivors-online-presence-spyware-recommendations