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A Tech-Based Tool To Address Campus Sexual Assault
Jessica Ladd was sexually assaulted while at Pomona College, just as one in five college women are. She says she found the reporting process, “more traumatic than the assault” itself. She felt “like I didn’t have control. A lack of agency. I wasn’t believed, and ended up regretting reporting.”
Ladd, now 31, put her experience “in a box in my mind.” She graduated, studied epidemiology and went to work in the area of STD prevention. But as the conversation started to change around sexual assault on campus, with the Obama administration pushing for schools to take a more active role in enforcement, she felt it was time to step forward and attack the problem.
Her solution is called Callisto: a software platform for secure online reporting of sexual abuse and harassment. It launched two and a half years ago and is currently in use on 12 campuses with a total of 149,000 students. It’s designed to increase the rate of reporting, the accuracy of reports, and give clearer, more actionable information both to survivors and to institutions. And it has one more special feature: It has the potential to help identify the repeat offenders who are thought to commit most sexual assaults.
Most research indicates that sexual crimes are underreported. One issue is that survivors may feel uncomfortable with something that has happened, but are unready or unwilling to make a formal accusation with their names attached.
Using Callisto, students can log on 24/7 to write a secure online account of their experience. The questions are based on best practices for investigating victims of traumatic events. The written account is encrypted and time-stamped. That feature is important, Ladd says, becasue when people report soon after an incident, recall is stronger and the details can be more clear. Ladd points to research that the time lag between sexual assaults and complaints on campuses averages 11 months.
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Illustration: LA Johnson/NPR
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