We support the introduction of a Digital Duty of Care. The shift from individual responsibility to system responsibility is necessary and overdue. Too often, online safety frameworks place the burden on the person experiencing harm to identify it, report it and navigate complaints processes after it has occurred. This mirrors a wider problem in Australia’s response to gender-based violence, where victim-survivors are expected to make harm visible and carry the response through systems that have not been designed around their safety. A Digital Duty of Care provides an important opportunity to change that approach by placing responsibility on online services to prevent and meaningfully respond to foreseeable harm.
However, gender-based violence remains a glaring omission from the exposure draft. The Bill does not expressly recognise gender-based violence, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence, as a systemic risk that providers must address. Specialist services see how deeply technology is now embedded in domestic, family and sexual violence and how online services can enable perpetrators to extend violence. As the Government develops the Second Action Plan under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032, leaving gender-based violence out of the Digital Duty of Care would be a monumental, missed opportunity to translate its national commitments into the systems that are increasingly shaping victim-survivors’ safety. A national commitment to end gender-based violence cannot sit separately from the laws governing the technologies through which that violence is increasingly perpetrated.
Read the Digital Duty Of Care – Sector Open Letter
