A text from an old school friend was the first red flag, but Lauren didn't see it

Lauren Trevan missed the first red flag that her ex-husband was using technology to control her.

It was the early 2000s and he was furious about a text she'd received from an old school friend who was male – a text he'd only know about if he'd looked at her phone.

"I realised he read my phone message, but I didn't really think it was such a big deal," Trevan tells 9honey.

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So focused on calming her ex down, she didn't stop to think about the implications until years later. By then, things had escalated dramatically.

More than half of domestic violence victim-survivors report their phones and text messages are checked without their consent 'all the time', according to charity DV Safe Phone, but Trevan didn't view her ex's actions as abusive until after they split.

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They'd started dating when she was 19 and he was in his late 20s. At first, he love bombed her.

"I thought he was smitten with me. I thought I was the luckiest person on the planet," Trevan says, but his behaviour soon changed.

He was jealous, manipulative and could be emotionally volatile and intimidating when Trevan didn't cater to his whims.

Once, he burst into their bedroom at 4am after a night out and started yelling, accusing her of seeing another man. It took her hours to convince him it wasn't true.

"He stood in the doorway with this look that I've never seen," she says of that "terrifying" night.

On another occasion, her ex threw one of their male neighbours against a wall and accused him of flirting with Trevan in the middle of a casual gathering.

Things didn't improve when they got married.

The abuse escalated when Trevan fell pregnant with the first of their two children, but she didn't report it because it wasn't physical.

Her ex controlled everything from how she folded his socks, to which margarine she bought, and how often they had sex. Terrified of his "blow ups", Trevan complied.

"I like to compare it to those electric shock collars people put on dogs. When the dog crosses the boundary, they get a shock and they learn not to. It was like that," she says.

"I knew he would have been one thousand times worse to me if I tried to leave. I knew he'd make my life absolute hell."

The control extended to her digital devices.

Trevan's ex had set up her phone and email accounts. She thought he was being helpful, but the truth was more sinister.

"I didn't realise that then he'd just be able to login and see everything," she says.

Her ex read all her digital communication, claimed he'd planted hidden cameras in their home, and Trevan is convinced he was tracking her outside the home too.

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These are textbook signs of technology-facilitated abuse (TFA), which is on the rise in domestic and family violence cases.

But back then, Trevan didn't even know she was being abused.

She left the relationship in 2015, after 16 years with her ex. He is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for multiple serious criminal offences.

A few weeks leaving, Trevan's boss helped her get a new phone that her ex couldn't monitor or track.

Later, she entered entered counselling and recognised what she'd been through as domestic violence for the first time.

Almost a decade on, Trevan knows she was subjected to coercive control - a pattern of physical or non-physical abuse that's used to hurt, scare, intimidate, threaten or control the victim - and is doing all she can to save others from the same fate.

Domestic violence affects one in four Australian women and one in eight Australian men, many of whom don't have access to a safe phone to seek support or plan an escape.

DV Safe Phone is trying to combat this epidemic by providing refurbished mobile phones to victim-survivors and it's already delivered over 10,000 in the last three years, but so many Aussies still need help.

There are more than 22.3 million redundant mobile phones in the country and too many end up in landfill when they could be helping victim-survivors like Trevan, who volunteers with the Queensland-based organisation.

She would have given anything for a safe phone when she was preparing to leave her ex.

"It's terrifying how much we rely on our phones now and how perpetrators are able to use them," she says. "We've got to nip this in the bud."

Trevan and DV Safe Phone are calling on individuals and businesses to make an impact by donating unused phones across the upcoming 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence (November 25 – December 10).

To find out more about how individuals and workplaces can get involved, click here.

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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