Screenshots, sim cards, and household governance: digital coercive control and evidence making in Uganda

Abstract

Tech facilitated intimate partner violence is increasingly embedded in everyday Ugandan digital life, including phone confiscation, SIM card control, WhatsApp monitoring, coerced "proof," mobile money coercion, and reputational threats. This article examines digital coercive control as household governance and analyses how survivors and frontline supporters produce evidence under threat, focusing on the practical work of assembling "evidence packages" that may include screenshots, voice notes, timelines, and witnesses. Drawing on comparative qualitative research across an informal settlement in Kampala, a regional town, and a rural district with strong kin governance, the analysis shows how digital control reorganizes access to communication and money, how evidence making is shaped by safety calculations and stigma, and how institutions unevenly validate or dismiss digital traces. The article contributes to the sociology of intimate partner violence by showing that evidentiary credibility is socially distributed: the same digital trace may be read as proof, gossip, provocation, shame, or insufficient evidence depending on the survivor's social position, available intermediaries, and institutional venue. The article advances a low-resource approach to safer evidence intake across policing, health care, and community mediation, emphasizing patterned coercive control and survivor safety.