With the increasing awareness of sexual violence as a widespread issue, more solutions are appearing to help tackle this problem. Empowered Together’s workshops operate in the primary prevention space – which focuses on education hopefully before any incidence of sexual violence occurs. While Empowered Together’s vision is still to see a world free of any sexual violence, we find it heartening to see innovative tech solutions popping up to help close the gap while improved education takes effect. We’ve put together some of these interesting solutions below.
Improved reporting technology
Platforms are appearing to make reporting of sexual violence easier and safer to address the underreporting of sexual assault. Callisto is a platform for the secure online reporting of any sexual violence. Available to over 160,000 US students over 13 colleges, sexual assault survivors can report safely, easily and securely through the platform. Callisto aims for a survivor-centred approach, giving them choice in what is done with the report so survivors can choose to send a record to the College, or only notify the school if another student names the same perpetrator. Callisto has found this increases the chances of reporting, and results in positive emotional and adjudicative outcomes, while also enabling colleges to detect repeat perpetrators. Potentially this could be rolled out further into professional environments, helping to deal with perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment in large companies. While not in Australia, there is a real need for this here with sexual assault and harassment a real problem in Australian universities.
Increasing information accessibility through chatbots
Another innovation are chatbots that help people find information about support services or obtain basic legal advice. Hello Cass is one such chatbot developed by Melbourne-based social enterprise Good Hood, currently in pilot and to be launched mid 2019. The chatbot talks to survivors and analyses the conversation using natural language processing, before responding with information about family and sexual violence, available counselling services, the legal system and safety planning. Another chatbot only in North America is Botler.ai – a chatbot which survivors in the US and Canada can use to figure out if they’ve experienced an incident which could be classified as sexual harassment or assault. This processes hundreds of thousands of court cases to help survivors label their experience and can also generate an incident report to help survivors report to police or their HR team at work. This is definitely something which an innovative person could create here in Australia as the Australian criminal justice system can make it extremely confusing for survivors to label and describe their experiences.
Heatmaps of sexual violence
Another method of using reporting to put the power back in the hands of survivors is the development of sexual violence heatmaps that allows people to identify and share public spaces where they feel uneasy, scared or assaulted, or alternatively spots where they feel safe, supported and happy. Free to Be was one of these heatmaps developed collaboratively with CrowdSpot and Monash University which developed a prototype with young women in Melbourne. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have been continued after its initial start. However, these are others being made around the world with examples in Egypt, India, Greece and the UK.
What next?
This only touches the surface of how tech is enabling solutions to tackle sexual assault. Apart from these, there are also blockchain solutions aiming to help sex workers and wearable technology which aims to help survivors share their stories and be believed. While these have been polarising, as it puts substantial onus on women to constantly prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted, it is also argued that they give women more choice and freedom to select solutions that work for them. Many of these tech solutions are still only in their embryonic stages but there are many opportunities here for entrepreneurs to expand on the solutions above to better help victims of sexual assault, and work towards that vision of a world without sexual violence.