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Cindy’s* whole life changed when she saw a lens reflecting in the light (Credits: Getty Images)
It was a rainy Saturday afternoon – the perfect day for a deep clean before the week ahead, Cindy* thought – but then she found something on the mantelpiece that stopped the mum-of-two in her tracks.
‘I didn’t know what it was. At first, I was confused, as I hadn’t noticed anything there before,’ she tells Metro. ‘But then I saw the reflection of the lens and realised it was a tiny camera.’
Cindy, who was in her early twenties at the time and just had her second child, didn’t know what to think. ‘I was in shock,’ she recalls. ‘I did some more cleaning and found another camera in the light switch.’
Slowly, it dawned on Cindy that her then-partner was spying on her.
‘I thought why the hell is he recording me?’ she remembers. ‘I’m cleaning the house, I’m looking after our child, I’m feeding a newborn. There’s nothing that I’m doing here that warrants me being recorded. I was in disbelief.’
A normal clean became a waking nightmare for Cindy (Picture: Getty)
Known as tech abuse, this type of gender-based violence has seen a significant rise in the past year, with the charity Refuge noting that referrals to their Technology-Facilitated Abuse Team rose by 62% in the first nine months of 2025, compared to 2024.
Signs of a coercive relationship
Cindy had been with her ex-partner, Andrew*, for two years, when she first realised what was going on.
To begin with, they had a smooth relationship, however he started being violent and showing signs of manipulation, isolating Cindy away from her loved ones.
‘He put down my family members, and friends. He said things like: “you only have fat friends, because when you go out with them people will have more attention on you, because you’re the skinnier, prettier one”,’ she explains.‘There were really subtle things that he mentioned numerous times that isolated me away from them.
‘During Covid, he told me if I ever got the vaccine, he would kick me out of the house and I wouldn’t be allowed to see my children. There’s a few people in my family who were classed as vulnerable during lockdown, which meant I had to lose out on seeing them.’
Cindy’s partner exercised control over her by telling her she could not get the Covid vaccine (Picture: Getty Images)
Spying on Cindy in her own home
Recording Cindy in the home they shared became another method of abuse – and something she only discovered by accident.
Andrew* would watch Cindy and send her messages throughout the day, showing that he knew what she was doing at all times.
‘He’d message ‘are you enjoying your cup of tea?’, and I just thought I was predictable. When I found the cameras it was the realisation – that was how he knew what I was doing.’
When Cindy confronted Andrew about why they were, he pretended he had no clue what she was talking about.
‘He said, point blank, “no, they’re not cameras. I don’t know what you’re going on about”, so I started questioning myself. He completely blindsided me, and made me believe him,’ she explains.
She started finding more and more cameras around the house (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
‘After that they disappeared for a while. A week later, I brought it up and asked where the tiny little things had gone. He just said “I don’t know what you’re talking about, there wasn’t anything there.”
‘It made me question my own sense of reality, and I began to think I was imagining things.’
A few weeks later, Cindy noticed light reflecting from a lens on a low table, where they kept a PlayStation and an Xbox.
Quickly, she realised that Andrew had put the cameras back in different places, finding more and more around the house.
‘Instead of the light switch, one was in the lampshade,’ she remembers. ‘When I said to him they were back, it was the same “no, they’re not cameras”, and then they disappeared again.’
Cindy’s partner would know exactly what she was doing while she was at home (Picture: Getty Images)
‘It was the same thing, over and over. They would come back, I was told I must have imagined them, and then they’d reappear in a different place. They were never, ever put back in the same spot.’
Then, Cindy’s abuser started appearing wherever she was.
There were multiple times when she was having a coffee with her mum in a café when he’d arrive uninvited, without being told by Cindy where she was going.
‘We could vary what shops and what towns we’d go in – but he’d turn up wherever we were. It was quite frightening.
‘I was concerned at the time, questioning why he was showing up wherever I was.’
Cindy couldn’t leave the house without PSEUDONYM tracking her (Picture: Getty Images)
More controlling behaviour through technology
As another method of control, Andrew would go through Cindy’s phone.
‘If I’d been out on a night out with a friend – which he put a stop to very, very quickly – I would come back home, and he would question who I had been messaging.
‘Then he would go through my phone. I suppose that’s when he could have put spyware on it.
‘One time, it was a friend from school I hadn’t seen for years, who I exchanged numbers with. Apparently, that meant I was cheating on him, so he wanted to check through my phone regularly.’
After months of Andrew knowing her whereabouts, checking her phone and the recurring cycle of the cameras disappearing and being moved, Cindy eventually stopped confronting him about the spying.
‘I turned them around, facing the other way, but I left them there and didn’t mention it. It was sort of to avoid conflict, and I thought he might assume they had just run out.
‘I don’t really know what I thought. I knew that I was planning to leave anyway, it was just a case of doing it safely.’
Leaving the abuse
Around six months after the last time she confronted him, in late 2021, Cindy escaped the abuse. She is now a single mum, living with her two children who are in primary school.
‘There was a lot of physical violence, too. I wasn’t prepared to put up with it anymore, especially with the kids,’ she explains. However, even though she was no longer with him, Andrew continued to stalk Cindy.
Cindy’s ex-partner would show up wherever she was, even after she left him (Picture: Getty Images)
‘I’d be walking the kids home from school, and he’d just turn up. I’d change my route, some days I’d walk, some days I’d get the bus, it didn’t matter. He’d be there.’
It was the last straw for Cindy and she got a new phone. But although it made it harder for her ex to keep tabs on her, he still found ways to stalk her – and continues to do so to this day.
Looking back, Cindy is still at a loss as to how Andrew managed to invade her privacy, day in, day out, however she has kept her old unused handset in case it might offer a clue one day.
‘I thought he’d tapped my phone. I never found out how he knew where I was when I was out of the house,’ she says.
‘With the cameras, and him turning up, I felt like I was in the Truman Show. Like it was my life, but it wasn’t my life.’
Looking to the future
Today, Cindy advocates for greater regulations on any equipment that could be used to video people without their consent.
Emma Pickering, Head of the Technology-Facilitated Abuse Team at Refuge, says that to combat this the government must introduce ‘regulation that ensures safety is built in by design, rather than harm being addressed as an afterthought.’
Emma Pickering highlights that safety measures around devices that record shouldn’t be an ‘afterthought’ (Picture: Supplied)
Cindy adds: ‘The police also need a lot more awareness. They were quite shocking in my case [when I reported it] and wouldn’t acknowledge it was abuse. One police officer said to me “well, you can have CCTV. Many people have it in their houses.’’’
Today, she is working hard on coming to terms with her new life, outside a coercive relationship.
‘I’m trying to ground myself. I know that, actually, life wasn’t okay, it wasn’t normal.
‘There’s cameras when you walk down the street, there’s face recognition in town centres, most of the time you’re watched when you’re out and about. You expect that, but not at home,’ she explains.
‘I’m not fully healed now. I don’t believe that you will ever fully be after an abusive relationship. You’re always going to have some form of trauma – you just learn to cope with that better.
‘You learn to deal with it, and live with it.’
*Name has been changed
Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available on 0808 2000 247 for free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A live chat service is also available from 10am to 10pm, Monday to Friday, and from 10am to 6pm on weekends.
For further information and advice, visit www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk. For support with tech-facilitated abuse, visit www.refugetechsafety.org.
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