Technology should be making it easier for those living in fear of a controlling partner to seek help, not harder.

The Women’s Refuge Shielded Site engages New Zealand businesses, and the public at large, by letting them turn their website into a place of refuge. Victims can seek help, without fear of it being seen by the prying eyes of a controlling partner or indeed ever appearing their browser’s history. Effectively, hiding help in plain sight.

The Shielded Site is a simple string of code that can be copy and pasted into any business, corporate or personal website’s HTML. The code embeds the Women’s Refuge Shielded icon, a badge of support that doubles as a shielded portal to the Women’s Refuge website.

This site launches in an obfuscated iFrame and contains all the vital information a victim needs to get help, as well as a direct portal to make contact – all without ever appearing in their web history.

Victims can seek help, without fear of it being seen by the prying eyes of a controlling partner. And by making the code readily available to New Zealand businesses, victims can find help in plain sight, on the country’s most visited websites.

To protect the vulnerable, the Shielded Site was designed to be untrack-able, however the project’s popularity has seen it added to the websites of New Zealand’s biggest companies, including some of the most trafficked daily-sites.

Each time a business adds the Shielded Site to their website they leverage their owned channels to PR their involvement - giving us increased awareness and resulting in a groundswell of support for their brand.

Our estimates project over 2 million website impressions and a social reach of over 400,000 - in country with a population of 4.5 million

Offshore partners have now expressed interest in taking the code globally, including introducing a proprietary direct calling featuring.

The initiative was launched in December 2016 and has no planned end date, with NZ businesses and blogs continuing to add the code to their sites every day.