We Are the Data, but Never the Researchers: Epistemic Violence in the Study of Technology-Facilitated Abuse

This article presents an auto-ethnographic analysis of research on technology-facilitated abuse affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, grounded in the author's experience as an Indigenous scholar working across academic, policy, and funding institutions. Indigenous women experience disproportionate levels of online harassment, image-based abuse, surveillance, and algorithmic profiling, yet are excluded from shaping research agendas, funding decisions, and policy responses. Key institutional processes governing technology-facilitated abuse research are opaque by design and inaccessible to conventional empirical methods. Auto-ethnography is therefore used to expose how settler institutions extract Indigenous experiences as data, accumulate funding and prestige, and reproduce colonial research economies that deny Indigenous authority over knowledge. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Studies and Indigenous feminist scholarship, the article argues that technology-facilitated abuse reflects settler-colonial logics embedded in research governance. It calls for Indigenous leadership, data sovereignty, and relational accountability as foundations for ethical research and meaningful reform.