New research reveals the most comprehensive picture yet of technology-facilitated abuse on dating platforms.
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The following story includes discussion of sensitive topics, including gender-based violence and psychological manipulation. Please consider whether you feel comfortable continuing. Support resources are available at the bottom of this page.
The results were stark, finding that abuse is common, repeated, and mostly invisible to platforms.
The report, Protected: Understanding tech-based abuse of women on dating platforms by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and funded by Minderoo Foundation found that ninety-nine per cent of women surveyed experienced at least one form of tech-based abuse in just the past three months of using a dating app.
Glossary
The below terms define varying forms of emotional and psychological manipulation tactics and abuse.
Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV): A form of abuse where digital tools are used to inflict harm based on gender.
Coercive control: An ongoing pattern of controlling behaviour aimed to dominate, intimidate, and strip away a person’s independence. It involves manipulation, restriction of freedom and inducing fear through tactics like financial abuse, extreme monitoring and isolation from support systems.
Love bombing: Overwhelming a new partner with extreme affection, attention and grand gestures to quickly force an intense emotional bond designed to manipulate and control.
Negging: Using backhanded compliments or subtle insults to undermine another person’s confidence and gain control.
Gaslighting: Manipulating someone else to make them doubt their memory, perception or sanity.
The most frequent forms of abuse include psychological manipulation, surveillance, unsolicited explicit content and coercive control. These are also the types of harms platforms are least likely to ever hear about.
Among the findings:
- 68 per cent of women experienced love bombing, which involves excessive flattery or affection designed to manipulate.
- 56 per cent experienced negging, including backhanded compliments and subtle insults.
- 53 per cent reported gaslighting.
- One in seven women received unsolicited sexually explicit messages more than five times in a three-month period.
- Over half of the participants have reported financial abuse.
Women were more likely to report overt abusive behaviour, such as threats or explicit images, rather than subtle forms of coercion and psychological abuse.
Behaviours like love bombing and contact policing are rarely reported, not because they aren’t harmful, but because women don’t always have the language, the confidence or the trust in reporting systems to flag them. That means the true scale of harm is significantly undercounted.
Understanding tech-based abuse of women on dating platforms
Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence is a form of abuse where digital tools are used to inflict harm based on gender. This report captures a wide spectrum of these harms.
This research was based on a survey of 1,008 heterosexual women in Australia who had used a dating platform over a three-month period at the end of 2025.
The research also found that women undertake extensive “safety work” to simply use the platforms by constantly:
- screening profiles
- filtering matches
- managing personal information
- monitoring interactions for warning signs
- anticipating risk
Platform design is failing to prevent harm and, in some cases, enabling it.
Features like activity indicators and unsolicited messaging give perpetrators tools to monitor, pressure and intrude.
Even safety and verification tools, when poorly designed, can backfire, creating a false sense of security or new avenues for harm rather than reducing risk.
When women do try to report abuse, they’re often met with confusing processes and automated, impersonal responses that discourage them from following through.
Platforms are also failing to communicate the safety features they already have, adding yet another burden onto women rather than lifting it.
The research has produced two practical tools to fix this.
The Tech-Based Abuse Experience Map charts where and how abuse occurs across the entire dating app journey, pinpointing clear intervention points for platforms and regulators to act on.
The Gendered Abuse on Dating Apps (GADA) Scale is a standardised measurement tool that captures the full spectrum of abuse – from the everyday to the extreme – enabling consistent tracking, reporting and comparison over time. It’s a tool that platforms, researchers and regulators can use to measure progress and drive real accountability.
This research lands at a critical moment for reform.
The proposed Digital Duty of Care (DDoC) is the single biggest lever currently on the table to change this trajectory. It would shift online services from reacting to harm after the fact, to proactively assessing and mitigating the risks their own design creates.
Australia’s goal to ending gender-based violence (GBV) in a generation under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 cannot be met while technology keeps expanding the reach, scale and speed of abuse and GBV, known as technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
TFGBV is not a separate category of harm, but an extension of existing GBV, enabled and amplified through digital technologies and increasingly linked to offline harm.
The DDoC, which will legally require tech platforms to identify, prevent and reduce serious harms before they happen, is a genuine opportunity to build TFGBV into the foundations of online safety regulation to prevent the harms at its source.
What needs to happen next?
Off the back of this research and the Minderoo submission to the Second Action Plan, we are calling for the following:
Gender-based violence and TFGBV should be named as a required risk category in the DDoC. This would sure gendered harms like coordinated harassment, coercive-control messaging, and image-based abuse are captured in online safety risk assessments.
Image-based sexual abuse should be named and treated as its own harm category in the DDoC and not addressed only through reactive tools like takedown notices. Reactive-only approaches leave mainstream platforms off the hook where this content circulates as a secondary use.
The DDoC should extend “hostile attitudes towards women” to include adults and beyond binary framing, and these protections shouldn’t be limited to children. Adults are also exposed to recommender-driven misogynistic content, which is a well-established driver of TFGBV, so this protection should extend to adults as well.
User control over algorithmically curated content should be strengthened, including opt-in recommender systems to cut involuntary exposure to misogynistic and violent content, especially for children and young people who encounter it within minutes of going online.