Before recommending a communication tool where family violence is a concern

If someone is in immediate danger, call 000 in Australia or 911 in the US. In Australia, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) offers free, confidential family violence support at any time. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is on 1-800-799-7233.

What the research says

Australian researchers have looked closely at post-separation parenting apps. A survey of 344 family law professionals in Australia and New Zealand found that about three quarters had recommended an app to clients, about two thirds of those had never tried one, and about a third had seen clients experience, or worry about, coercive control through an app.

Research with people who had experienced family violence found that most found an app helpful: it set boundaries around contact and created a record. But some reported that the other parent used the app itself to keep up pressure, and that professionals sometimes misread what had happened on the platform. The researchers’ conclusion was careful: these tools can reduce harm for many people, but they are not a cure, particularly where control is entrenched.

That makes the choice of tool part of the safety picture. These questions are a starting point.

Ten questions to ask about any tool

1. Does it keep your client in a shared ecosystem with the other party? A shared platform is still a room both people are in. For some clients that’s fine. For others, distance matters more than shared features.
2. Can the other party see your client’s activity? Read receipts, online status, location features and edit histories can all be used to monitor. Check what each person can see about the other.
3. Who controls shared items? Where a calendar or schedule can be changed by one person, it can become a lever. Check that control is fair and balanced.
4. Can your client stop absorbing hostile messages without losing the record? Avoiding messages entirely can mean missing deadlines and arrangements. Reading raw messages in full can be harmful. Look for a tool that separates the two.
5. Is your client’s real email address and phone number protected? Some tools route messages through an intermediary so neither is exposed.
6. What is the other party told, and can that be changed where telling them is unsafe? Transparency is usually right. Your client should still have a safe option where notice itself could create risk.
7. Is the record complete and checkable? A record your client curates is easy to attack. A continuous one, with the originals and the messages as delivered, is harder to dispute.
8. Who pays, and could cost be used as leverage? Shared subscriptions can turn into one more thing to argue about, or one more way to exert control.
9. Does it sit comfortably with any protection order? The order’s conditions come first. A tool should never be presented as permission for contact the order doesn’t allow.
10. Have you tried it yourself? Ten minutes using a tool will tell you more than any brochure, including ours.

How FenceChat answers these questions

We would rather you judge FenceChat against this list than take our word for it. In brief:

• No shared space. Your client sets FenceChat up alone. The other party writes by ordinary email or text and never has to download an app or join anything.
• Limited visibility for the other party. After a one-time notice that messages are processed by AI and stored, the only sign is a short “Sent via FenceChat using AI” line on replies your client sends through FenceChat. They aren’t told when a message is read or what was removed. Even with the notice switched off, replies sent through FenceChat carry that line. Where that is a risk, your client can reply another way.
• Threats are flagged, never softened. Where the filter detects a threat, the threatening words are replaced with one plain line saying exactly what was threatened, and the message is flagged as a possible threat. If your client has texts sent to their phone, they also get a short text alert. No filter catches everything, so the originals always stay available.
• Real details protected. Your client’s replies go out without revealing their own email address, and text messages run through a FenceChat number rather than their own mobile.
• A safe option on the notice. Your client can turn off the one-time sender notice where telling the other party could put them at risk.
• Distance and a record together. Your client reads a filtered version with the facts kept. The original is kept beside it, sealed in order, for if and when it is needed. Filtering can make escalating behaviour harder to see, so where risk is being assessed, look at the originals and the pattern labels too.
• Only your client pays. There is no shared fee to argue about.

What FenceChat can’t do

• It doesn’t stop the other party contacting your client some other way, or turning up in person.
• It filters the wording of messages, not their purpose. A message can be polite and still controlling, and the facts it keeps may include demands your client finds hard to read.
• It isn’t a safety plan, a protection order or a support service, and it doesn’t replace any of them.
• Like many services, anyone can sign up, including a person causing harm. FenceChat never gives one person access to another person’s account, inbox or messages, and its pattern labels describe wording, not people.

Our own policies

• Family violence policy. We never ask a customer to contact the person causing harm, and they choose how we contact them, including replies that wait in their Dashboard instead of arriving by email.
• Complaints. A published process, acknowledged within 2 working days. As a member of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, we can be held to account by the TIO if a complaint isn’t resolved.
• Reporting harmful material. Our online safety page explains how anyone can report harmful material to us, and how we respond to the eSafety Commissioner.

Sources

• Payne, Smyth, Irving and others, family law professionals’ views of post-separation parenting apps, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family
• Irving, post-separation parenting apps in the context of family violence, Law, Technology and Humans, 2024
• ANU and Relationships Australia, post-separation parenting app information for parents and practitioners