How Smart Devices Are Being Weaponized in Domestic Abuse: Inside the Madison Tech Clinic with Sophie Stephenson | Ep 26

In this episode of Rights and Remedies, I sit down with Sophie Stephenson, Director of Operations at the Madison Tech Clinic and a PhD candidate in computer sciences at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on understanding and combating modern forms of technology-facilitated abuse - work that is not only groundbreaking but urgently needed.The Madison Tech Clinic provides direct, trauma-informed services to survivors of tech-based abuse across Wisconsin. Sophie shares how her team helps survivors investigate concerns like phone hacking, spyware, and online harassment, and how they’re training tech experts to respond with both technical skill and care.We discuss how the clinic helps survivors investigate these concerns and build credible, court-ready evidence, something lawyers and advocates are increasingly being asked to support.Sophie also shares insight into their outreach with Indigenous communities and the tech dynamics driving the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis, plus the impact of AI-generated imagery in escalating abuse.This conversation is essential for legal professionals navigating modern abuse dynamics, and for anyone committed to supporting survivors in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.Learn more or refer clients to the clinic: 🔗 techclinic.cs.wisc.eduConnect with Sophie:🔗 LinkedInResources recommended by Sophie:Safety Net ProjectRefuge - What is Technology-Facilitated Abuse?Take It DownStop NCIIWithout My ConsentRight To BeEnd Tech-Enabled AbuseReferences: Naman Gupta, Sanchari Das, Kate Walsh, and Rahul Chatterjee. 2024. A Critical Analysis of the Prevalence of Technology-Facilitated Abuse in US College Students. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.