Woman says husband coerced her into sex through tech abuse

Websites that facilitate intimate contact are being pulled into a harder question: what duty of care do they owe when alleged coercion, consent disputes and intimate-partner pressure collide online? Ruth O'Grady says a swinging platform became part of a wider pattern of abuse after her husband persuaded her to join, even though she did not want to. She says she told him she would never have sex in a car with a stranger, yet within months she says she was doing exactly that.

Her account sits squarely inside the framework now used in England and Wales to understand coercive control. UK Government guidance says technology-facilitated abuse is an increasingly prevalent form of controlling or coercive behaviour and may occur as part of a pattern of behaviour. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 widened the offence so controlling or coercive behaviour can apply even when partners do not live together, reflecting the reality that abuse can follow people through phones, websites and messaging platforms. Crown Prosecution Service guidance goes further, saying all controlling or coercive behaviour cases should be flagged as domestic abuse.

Refuge describes coercive control as an act, or a pattern of acts, of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation that abusers use to harm, punish or frighten survivors. The organisation has also warned that technology is increasingly being weaponised to exert control. Emma Pickering, one of Refuge’s specialists on technology-facilitated abuse, has helped shape that warning into a practical issue for services, platforms and police: abuse does not have to look like visible violence to be severe, persistent and criminal.

The scale of the problem has grown sharply. Refuge says its specialist technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment service, set up in 2017, has seen referrals rise 207% compared with its first year. In the first six months of 2024, referrals were up 92% compared with the same period in 2019. That increase suggests more survivors are identifying digital control as abuse, but it also raises the stakes for websites that host or enable intimate encounters, because a platform can become part of the mechanism of coercion as easily as a phone or account login.

Ruth O'Grady’s story is not just about sex. It is about how consent can be eroded through pressure, how digital systems can be folded into domestic abuse, and how safeguarding must catch up when intimate-partner control is routed through technology.