When Your Phone Becomes a Watchtower: What New 2025-2026 Research Reveals About Digital Coercive Control

If your phone no longer feels like yours, if your location is watched, your messages are read, or your passwords are demanded, you may be experiencing digital coercive control: the use of technology to track, monitor, and intimidate a partner. New 2025-2026 research reveals this form of abuse is far more widespread than most women realize, and that being watched this way damages the mind, the body, and the soul. This article explains what the latest science shows, why it feels so confusing and so hard to name, what Scripture has to say about control and trust, and how you can take gentle, concrete steps to reclaim your private life.

You have probably heard the little voice that says, "Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe he just loves me and worries about me. Maybe I am hiding something by wanting privacy." Please hear the truth that anchors this whole article: privacy is not the same as secrecy, and wanting your phone, your thoughts, and your whereabouts to be yours is not suspicious. It is healthy. When constant watching is framed as love, the confusion is the whole point, and naming it is the first step back to freedom.

What Is Digital Coercive Control?

Researchers define digital coercive control as the use of digital technology by a perpetrator to control, track, monitor, and intimidate a current or former partner within a larger pattern of control. ^[2] It rarely happens in isolation. It tends to sit alongside other quiet forms of control: checking in, isolating, questioning your memory, and deciding what is allowed. The phone is often simply the newest place where that control lives.

In a 2025 analysis of 4,501 cases of online harm reported to a crisis helpline, researchers identified technology-facilitated intimate partner violence as a distinct category that includes cyberstalking, coercive control, harassment, and image-based abuse. ^[1] Another 2025 study in the Journal of Family Violence, drawing on a nationally representative survey of 9,604 women in Australia, separated technology-facilitated abuse into distinct forms: stalking and monitoring, image-based abuse, and online aggression and harassment. ^[2] The science is clear: this is not a niche problem. It is one of the most common faces of control in the digital age.

The Quiet Signs That Monitoring Is Happening

Digital coercive control rarely announces itself. It shows up in small, repeated moments that, on their own, can seem almost reasonable. Together they form a pattern. You might recognize some of these from your own life:

• Your partner tracks your real-time location through an app, a smartwatch, your car, or a small tracking device slipped into a bag or tucked under a seat.
• You are asked to keep location sharing on at all times, and turning it off causes a fight.
• Phones, texts, emails, and direct messages are checked, sometimes while you sleep or when you step away.
• Passwords to your phone, email, and social media are demanded, and refusing is treated as proof you are hiding something.
• Your social media activity is monitored, including the locations attached to your posts and who likes or comments.
• You receive a constant stream of "where are you," "who are you with," and "why did you take so long" messages that feel less like care and more like a spotlight.
• Cameras in the home, including doorbell and baby monitors, are used to observe your comings and goings rather than to keep the family safe.

A 2025 scoping review of 16 studies found that these online control and monitoring behaviors, including constant texting and calling to track whereabouts, are the most-studied form of technology-facilitated coercive control, and that young people consistently name them as an invasion of privacy. ^[3] When your gut says "this should not be happening," your gut is not broken. It is reading the pattern correctly.

What New 2025-2026 Research Reveals About How Common This Is

The numbers are sobering, and knowing them matters because it names what too many women have been silently carrying. A widely cited survey of domestic violence programs found that 97% reported that abusers misuse technology to stalk, harass, and control the survivors they serve, with nearly 80% reporting that abusers monitor survivors' social media. ^[5] In the United Kingdom, 72% of women accessing domestic abuse services in a recent national snapshot said they had experienced technology-facilitated abuse. ^[6]

In 2022, a national survey of more than 4,000 women found that 1 in 3 had experienced online abuse on social media or other platforms, and that 1 in 6 of those women experienced it from a partner or former partner. ^[6] Separate research on technology-facilitated stalking found that 84% of women who experienced it said it affected their mental health and wellbeing. ^[7] And a 2026 study introduced a term researchers are beginning to use for a newer tool of control: Bluetooth item finders, small devices designed to help you find your keys, have quietly become a preferred way for abusers to watch a survivor's movements without ever physically stalking them. ^[4]

None of this is about technology being bad. Technology is a gift, and it has helped countless women find information, community, and help. The harm is never in the device. The harm is in how one person uses it to shrink another person's freedom, and that choice is what the research names as abuse. ^[12]

"You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar."

Psalm 139:1-2

Why It Feels So Confusing, and Why That Is the Point

If you have ever caught yourself wondering whether you are "being dramatic," you are not weak, and you are not the first woman to wonder it. Monitoring is often dressed in protective language: "I just worry about you," "I want to know you are safe," "Why do you need that much privacy if you have nothing to hide?" These questions are designed to make your own desire for privacy feel like guilt. Psychology Today's 2025 guide to ending emotional abuse describes how abuse runs on blame and on keeping the other person in a state of constant emotional alarm. ^[11] The confusion is not a flaw in you. It is a feature of what you are living in.

Dr. Caroline Leaf describes relationships like this as ones that "literally rewire your brain" and erode your sense of self. ^[9] And recent writing on gaslighting points to the same mechanism: chronic invalidation corrupts the brain's prediction-error system, so that a person stops trusting what she sees and remembers. ^[10] When you are told often enough that privacy is hiding and that your sense of discomfort is irrational, your brain begins to pre-empt the accusation and doubt itself before you even think a private thought. That is not a character flaw. That is a wound, and wounds heal.

What Scripture Says About Control and Trust

When technology is used for control, a woman of faith can feel a unique pressure: "God sees everything, so maybe I should not mind being seen." But Scripture draws a beautiful and crucial line between God's gaze and human control. Psalm 139 is not a license for surveillance. It is a love poem about a God whose knowledge of you is woven with tender care, who knew you before you were born and who guides you toward the "ancient path" that is life, not toward a cage. God's knowing never shrinks anyone. It frees.

Biblical love does not keep a watchtower over you. First Corinthians 13 describes love as patient and kind, as a love that "does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud," and notably, as a love that "keeps no record of wrongs." A love that polices every move is not the love Scripture describes. It is possession wearing love's clothes.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

John 10:10

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Second Corinthians 3:17 ties the very presence of God to freedom. A relationship that grows your freedom in Christ is a place where you can flourish. A relationship that slowly removes your freedom, beginning with the smallest privacy, is working against the Spirit's work in you. And Matthew 10:16 invites wisdom without shame: be "as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." Seeking safety for your own peace is not unfaithfulness. It is wisdom, and God calls it a virtue.

Small Steps to Reclaim Your Private Life

You do not have to solve everything at once, and safety always comes first. If you feel at risk of physical harm, connect with a domestic violence advocate before changing anything about a device that may be monitored. If you feel calm enough to begin, here are gentle, evidence-informed ways to take your private life back.

1. Name the pattern out loud. Write down the concrete behaviors: "My location is always shared with him." "He reads my messages." "I cannot spend money without explaining." Naming what is happening breaks the fog of "maybe it is all in my head," and it gives you a record of your own reality.

2. Notice the story you are telling yourself. When you catch yourself explaining away monitoring as protection, pause and ask, "Is this love, or is this control in the costume of concern?" The 2025-2026 research repeatedly finds that survivors describe feeling watched, and that this constant vigilance is one of the most damaging parts of tech-facilitated abuse. ^[3] Your noticing is not paranoia. It is the first small liberty.

3. Try one boundary. Turn off one location-sharing setting for a set period, or leave your phone in another room during one part of your day, or decline to answer a "where are you" message immediately. Notice what rises up: fear, guilt, or relief. Each of these is information, and none of it makes you a bad person.

4. Build a circle of safe people. Isolation is how control grows, and safe community is one of the strongest healing medicines. ^[8] Tell one trusted friend, sister, counselor, or pastor what is happening. You were not made to carry a watched life alone.

5. Reconnect your body to yourself. Being watched creates a state of low-grade alert, and living in that state is exhausting. Gentle practices like slow breathing, a walk where no one knows where you are, or sitting with a cup of tea in a room where you are not observed can begin to bring your nervous system back to rest. Your body has been holding tension on your behalf, and it deserves kindness.

Reflection Questions

Sit with these gently, the way you would sit with a friend. There is no wrong answer.

• When was the last time your phone felt entirely yours, and what changed after that?
• What small act of privacy would you most want back, even just for one hour?
• If a dear friend described your situation, would you call it love or control?
• What story would you need to stop telling yourself to begin believing your discomfort is valid?
• Who is one safe person you could tell the truth to this week?

Actionable Steps for This Week

You do not have to reclaim every corner of your life in one week. Here are three small, doable ways to begin:

1. Do a gentle digital peace check. In one quiet sitting, make a list of the tracking, sharing, and password arrangements in your life and mark them honestly: which ones you chose freely, and which ones feel more like a toll you pay to keep the peace. If it is safe to do so, change one password and log out of the accounts that are being checked. Do not delete or disable anything you are not certain about, and if you are worried about a hidden app or device, contact a technology safety specialist or your local domestic violence agency before making changes. Awareness and record-keeping are often the safest first moves.
2. Practice one hour of un-watched peace. Choose one part of your day, even fifteen minutes at first, where you leave your phone in another room or turned over and give yourself to something entirely yours: a walk, a warm drink, a page of Scripture, a long bath. Let yourself feel what it is like to be unobserved, and let one truth settle: you were never meant to live under a watchtower, and a good God does not want you there.
3. Tell one safe person and pray one honest prayer. Reach out to the person you named in the reflection questions and say one true sentence about your reality. Then pray without editing yourself: "Lord, You see me and You love me, and Your knowing never cages me. Give me wisdom, courage, and people to walk with me as I take back the life You made me free to live." God is not threatened by your questions, and He is not standing over you with a camera. He is standing with you, in the light, on the way to the full life He has promised.