The Domestic Unprotected Zone: Algorithmic Governance and the Reproduction of Perpetrator Discourse in Conversational AI

Abstract:Conversational AI increasingly mediates intimate-partner communication, and refusal logic at the inference layer now functions as a governance threshold for gendered harm. This article asks whether such systems reproduce discursive forms historically tied to the privatization of intimate violence. A three-stage audit of six widely accessible conversational AI systems compares refusal behaviour across 1,600 crossed prompts per system, isolates relational framing through 300 matched prompt pairs, and contrasts pre-submission framing with post-output critique across fresh sessions. Four systems refused fewer than 1% of prompts. ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 refused most requests, but residual leakage clustered under intimate framing. Switching from a non-intimate to an intimate-partner descriptor amplified non-refusal 4.4-fold and 10.8-fold. Post-output critique produced in-session acknowledgement that did not carry across fresh sessions, with 96-100% of leaked prompts re-leaking. The article names this pattern the Domestic Unprotected Zone, a privatization-like threshold at the inference layer.

59 pages, 8 figures, 27 tables. Supplementary material (S1-S4) included as an appendix. Preprint; under review

Computers and Society (cs.CY); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

K.4.2; K.4.1; I.2.7

arXiv:2609.28479 [cs.CY]

(or arXiv:2609.28479v1 [cs.CY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28479 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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