Legal Guides

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: These legal guides were originally created as part of The Recharge Project — a collaboration between Domestic Violence Resource Centre, Women’s Legal Services NSW and WESNET — back in 2015. A very big thank you to Women’s Legal Service NSW for updating the content in 2019.  The content has been updated again by WESNET in 2022.

Technology-facilitated stalking and abuse is the use of technology (such as the internet, social media, mobile phones, computers, and surveillance devices) to stalk and perpetrate abuse on a person.

Such behaviour includes:

  • making numerous and unwanted calls to a person’s mobile phone
  • sending threatening and/or abusive messages (texting messaging, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Facebook messaging, Twitter)
  • hacking into a person’s email or social media account to discover information about them
  • hacking into a person’s email or social media account to impersonate them and send abusive messages to family/friends of that person
  • using surveillance devices to spy on a person
  • sharing, or threatening to share, intimate pictures of a person

There are four primary areas of law relevant to people experiencing technology-facilitated stalking and abuse:

  • Protection Orders
  • Surveillance and Recordings
  • Relevant Criminal Offences
  • Image-based abuse

For more information, please click on the relevant State or Territory.