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This paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. In this case, the modernisation of a court system that for too‐long served as an obstacle to survivors' legal protection and facilitated abusers' ability to engage in slow violence during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings. This paper thus highlights the 'temporal affordances' of longitudinal research that enable analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system. This paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. This paper thus highlights the 'temporal affordances' of longitudinal research that enable analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors' experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women's experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts' transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Digital technologies enable abusers to extend their spatial and temporal control. • Technology-enabled coercive control is a continuation of harm, not a new form of abuse. • Technology-enabled coercive control is economical, convenient and efficient. This paper examines how domestic violence abusers utilize digital technologies to extend their spatial and temporal control over survivors. By highlighting how digital technologies have become central tools for abusers to threaten, stalk, harass and surveil their partners, we situate technology-enabled coercive control as a continuation of harm perpetrated by domestic violence abusers, rather than a new or distinct form of abuse. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Seattle with survivors, advocates, law enforcement officers and prosecutors, we show how digital technologies enable abusers to more efficiently and effectively coercively control survivors anywhere and at any time, including after the relationship has ended. This paper contributes to geographic scholarship analyzing the role of digital technologies in policing and surveillance and advances this literature through a feminist geographic analytic that offers an embodied accounting of the way digital technologies regulate, discipline and govern at the scale of the body and within intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]