When Switzerland's Federal Department of Home Affairs (EDI) launched Phase 2 of L'égalité contre la violence (Equality Prevents Violence) on June 1, 2026, it made a deliberate editorial choice: alongside a module on children exposed to domestic violence, it named digital surveillance as a form of abuse — not a privacy grey zone, not a cybercrime sideshow, but a weapon used to maintain coercive control over intimate partners.
That framing is backed by data. The Federal Statistical Office's Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik (PKS) 2025 recorded 22,066 domestic violence offences — a 4.4% increase on 2024 — representing 44% of all registered violent crimes in Switzerland. Of 55 homicides, 34 were domestic, with 21 occurring in current or former intimate partnerships. Among 12,348 recorded victims, 70.2% were women. Domestic violence is not a peripheral category in Switzerland's crime picture; it dominates it.
Phase 2 also activated helpline 142, now available around the clock following its May 2026 launch, providing free and anonymous support to victims, witnesses, and bystanders. Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider has positioned this as Switzerland's first systematic federal prevention effort after years of primarily cantonal-level responses.
Digital Surveillance as a Control Mechanism
The campaign's inclusion of digital surveillance reflects documented patterns: location-tracking apps installed without consent, shared credentials used to monitor movements, social media access used to screen communications, and covertly installed software that mirrors messages or logs calls. These tools can operate invisibly — a victim may not know her device is reporting location in real time or that her messages are being read remotely.
Naming this explicitly as domestic violence, rather than treating it as a distinct cybercrime category, matters. It shapes how police triage complaints, how social workers classify incidents, and how prosecutors frame charges. The campaign's communication addresses perpetrators directly — a design choice that researchers have shown is more effective than messaging aimed solely at potential victims or passive bystanders.
Article 181b StGB: Technology-Neutral Drafting Done Right
Switzerland's legal architecture updated in parallel. Article 181b of the Swiss Criminal Code (StGB), which entered into force on January 1, 2026, criminalises stalking as a standalone offence for the first time. The provision is technology-neutral by design: it covers persistently following, harassing, or threatening someone in a manner that significantly restricts their freedom to shape their life. Swiss legal practitioners have confirmed this formulation encompasses cyberstalking, covert GPS tracking, and repeated digital contact — without enumerating specific tools, which would invite circumvention within years.
The maximum penalty is three years' imprisonment or a monetary fine. The open-ended conduct standard requires pattern, persistence, and proportionate harm — exactly the calibration demanded by critics of overbroad cyber-harassment legislation elsewhere. A closed list of prohibited technologies becomes obsolete; a conduct-centred threshold adapts.
The Complaint Requirement: One Architectural Flaw
Article 181b is not a complete solution. It operates on a private complaint basis: victims must initiate prosecution themselves within three months of the incident. The National Council's Legal Commission proposed automatic prosecution (ex officio) in intimate-partner cases during deliberations — a proposal debated and ultimately not adopted.
This is a significant gap in the coercive control context. A victim whose partner monitors her device, controls her finances, and isolates her from social support is among the least likely to file a criminal complaint unilaterally within ninety days. The complaint requirement presumes a degree of autonomy that coercive control systematically removes. The Federal Office for Gender Equality (EBG) administers Switzerland's National Action Plan 2022–2026 under the Istanbul Convention, and Article 55 of that Convention obliges ratifying states to allow prosecution to continue even if victims withdraw complaints. Switzerland's reservation on ex officio prosecution for this specific offence creates a compliance gap that GREVIO is likely to flag in its forthcoming evaluation.
The Vaud Experiment: Surveillance Deployed Correctly
Not all surveillance in this context is abusive. The canton of Vaud is piloting GPS electronic bracelets for convicted domestic violence perpetrators in the second half of 2026, with a dynamic alert option that notifies victims when a perpetrator breaches proximity limits. A 24-canton Electronic Monitoring association has developed a standardisation framework; per-bracelet costs are estimated at CHF 7,500–15,000 annually.
The contrast is instructive. Surveillance technology deployed against a convicted perpetrator — under judicial oversight, with victim notification capability built in — is categorically different from covert device monitoring by an abuser. Switzerland's Phase 2 campaign and the legal architecture surrounding it are beginning to articulate that distinction explicitly. That is the proportionate model worth defending: specific authority for specific harms, not broad mandates that expand the surveillance surface indiscriminately.
What Switzerland Gets Right, and What Still Needs Work
Switzerland's current approach has genuine strengths: a technology-neutral stalking law, a national campaign that names digital tools as weapons, a revised Federal Act on Data Protection (nDSG, in force September 2023) under which covertly collected intimate-life data constitutes sensitive personal data whose unlicensed processing is presumptively unlawful, and a national helpline now funded at federal level.
What it lacks is procedural automaticity in the cases where it matters most. The three-month private complaint window for Article 181b in intimate-partner cases is an architectural mismatch with coercive control dynamics. Extending ex officio prosecution to current and former partners — as the Legal Commission initially proposed — is the obvious next step. The 2026 campaign provides the public framing; the legislative fix is overdue.