criminal-legal-system

Criminal Legal System

The criminal legal system — police, prosecution, courts, and incarceration — is the institutional channel toward which much anti-violence response is oriented, and a recurring point of tension in this vault. For Sexual Violence the funnel is steep: RAINN estimates that of every 1,000 assaults, only about 310 are reported to police and roughly 25 perpetrators are incarcerated, meaning the vast majority are never held accountable through criminal channels. Critics of “carceral feminism” — Aya Gruber, Mimi Kim, and others — argue that relying on policing, mandatory-arrest laws, and no-drop prosecution to protect women has unevenly harmed poor communities and communities of colour, increasing arrests of Black men and exposing survivors themselves to criminalisation. This is why the system cannot be treated as a neutral endpoint for safety technology.

Many Reporting Apps and Evidence Documentation tools are designed, implicitly or explicitly, to feed this system: to produce “institutionally legible” accounts that police and courts will accept. Henne, Shelby and Harb show that this entanglement is a design feature rather than an accident, and that it carries racialised risks — a critique that connects the system directly to Racial Capitalism. For a Victim-Survivor, the choice to route a disclosure through law enforcement is rarely simple, and Survivor-Centered Design approaches increasingly treat non-carceral support as a first-class option.

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Tags: #concept #criminal-legal-system #carceral

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racial-capitalism

Racial Capitalism

Racial capitalism is the argument, developed by Cedric J. Robinson in Black Marxism (1983), that capitalism did not negate the racialism of the feudal European order but grew within it, so that capital accumulation continually generates and reproduces racial hierarchies. Robinson took the phrase from analysts of apartheid South Africa and generalised it: race and class are inextricable, and “racial capitalism” names modern capitalism as such, not a special variant of it. Robin D. G. Kelley’s gloss is that capitalism was “racial capitalism” from the beginning — its tendency was always to differentiate and exploit through racial regimes, not to homogenise.

In this vault the concept supplies the critical lens for reading anti-violence technology against the grain. Henne, Shelby and Harb’s study of Reporting Apps argues that these tools reproduce racial capitalism: they extract data from users, build property relations on data ownership and accumulation, commodify “diversity and inclusion,” and sustain ties to the Criminal Legal System that carry racialised risks. The lesson is that the seemingly neutral act of “building evidence” or “collecting data” is never neutral — it shapes whose stories become legible and who profits. This frames Techno-Solutionism as not merely naive but materially interested.

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Tags: #concept #racial-capitalism #critical

four-domains-of-power

Four Domains of Power

The four domains of power come from Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, describing how oppression is organised and managed at four social levels:

Structural — large institutions and economic imbalance (laws, education, funding for shelters and women’s health).
Disciplinary — organisational practice and bureaucracy (e.g. a justice system where only ~1.3% of UK rape cases charged; “hierarchies of victimhood”).
Hegemonic — norms, culture and ideology that legitimise patriarchal oppression (shaming, “honour,” victim-blaming).
Interpersonal — direct, visible, day-to-day harm, including both stranger harassment and Intimate Partner Violence.

The Safest Woman Alive adapts the framework to show that most Personal Safety Apps and safety wearables address only the interpersonal domain, leaving the structural, disciplinary and hegemonic drivers of Gender-Based Violence untouched — and argues HCI should design across all four.

In this vault

AnalysesGender-Based Violence
CountersTechno-Solutionism

datafication-of-metoo

The Datafication of #MeToo

Reference: Kathryn Henne, Renee Shelby & Jenna Harb (2021). “The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies.” Big Data & Society, 8(2). DOI 10.1177/20539517211055898.

Summary

A critical study of Reporting Apps — software platforms and AI chatbots that offer users emergency assistance, education, and a way to report and build evidence against perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence. Through an in-depth analysis of two reporting apps, Henne, Shelby and Harb argue that these tools construct data to fit institutionally legible narratives of violence, and in doing so reproduce racial capitalism: they extract information from users, reinforce property relations built on data ownership and accumulation, commodify “diversity and inclusion,” and often sustain problematic ties to the criminal legal system.

Its value to this vault is as a counterweight to celebratory framings of safety tech. It foregrounds the racialised dimensions of the data capital these apps generate, and warns that the design choice to “build evidence” is never neutral — it shapes whose stories become legible and who benefits from the resulting data. The authors note these dynamics are not unique to anti-violence apps but are constitutive of digital platforms generally.

Key ideas

Anti-violence reporting apps are datafication engines as much as support tools — the data they generate is itself capital.
“Institutionally legible” evidence privileges some narratives (and some survivors) over others.
Entanglement with the Criminal Legal System is a design feature, not an accident, and carries racialised risks.
Extraction, financial partnerships, and commodified inclusion recur across platforms, not just safety apps.

Connections

StudiesReporting Apps
StudiesEvidence Documentation
CritiquesPrivacy and Safety
- Reframes “data collection” as extraction and accumulation.
ExaminesRacial Capitalism
AddressesGender-Based Violence
Related toCriminal Legal System

Sources

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517211055898

reporting-and-disclosure

Reporting and Disclosure

Reporting and disclosure covers the spectrum of ways a Victim-Survivor makes harm known — from confiding in a friend, to telling an advocate or hotline, to filing a formal complaint with police or an institution. These are not the same act, and the distance between them is wide: RAINN estimates that only about 310 of every 1,000 sexual assault survivors report to law enforcement, with rates lower still among college students. A systematic review of barriers (“Silenced Survivors”) finds the obstacles are psychological, sociocultural, and systemic at once — shame, fear of disbelief, fear of prosecution, and distrust of institutions all suppress formal reporting. Disclosure is therefore better understood as a process than a single threshold event.

Anti-violence technology intervenes at every point on this spectrum. Some tools lower the cost of an early, informal disclosure; Reporting Apps aim to convert disclosure into a record that the Criminal Legal System will accept, which links reporting tightly to Evidence Documentation. Crisis lines offer disclosure without any obligation to report onward, which is why their confidentiality guarantees matter so much. The design risk, foregrounded in the Datafication of MeToo critique, is that tools optimised for “institutionally legible” reporting can crowd out the survivor’s own priorities and quietly funnel disclosures toward carceral outcomes.

In this vault

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Tags: #concept #reporting #disclosure

survivor-centered-design

Survivor-Centered Design

Survivor-centered design places the rights, needs, safety, and stated preferences of people who have experienced violence at the center of every design decision, rather than treating them as a population to be managed. A survivor-centered approach prioritises a survivor’s safety, agency, and wellbeing, and insists that survivors be involved at every stage of design and implementation — not consulted once and then designed around. In service and product terms it translates into the trauma-informed commitments of safety, choice, consent, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment, and into reframing the operative question from “why isn’t this survivor ready?” to “what does this survivor need right now to feel safe?”. It treats lived experience as expertise and resists building tools for survivors without building them with survivors.

The approach is closely tied to Trauma-Informed Design (its principles overlap heavily) and is the practical lens through which a vault tool is judged to genuinely centre the Victim-Survivor. It is informed by Feminist HCI and design-justice thinking, which name whose voices design usually erases. Survivor-centered design also sets a critical boundary against Techno-Solutionism: a flashy feature that increases a survivor’s exposure, or that an abuser can repurpose, fails the test no matter how clever, which is why these projects weigh Privacy and Safety and the realities of Coercive Control before shipping.

In this vault

Related toTrauma-Informed Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
Informed byFeminist HCI
Tension withTechno-Solutionism

Sources

https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/design-survivor-centred-programme
https://wscadv.org/projects/domestic-violence-housing-first/toolkit/survivor-driven-trauma-informed-mobile-advocacy/

Tags: #concept #design #survivor-centered

victim-survivor

Victim-Survivor

Victim-survivor is the term used in much lived-experience-led practice (including Insight Exchange’s) for a person who has been subjected to violence and abuse. It deliberately holds both realities at once — the harm done to a person and their ongoing agency — and signals a stance of centring that person’s own meaning, pace and decisions, as in Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design.

In this vault

Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Subjected toGender-Based Violence

evidence-documentation

Evidence Documentation

Evidence documentation is the practice of recording incidents of abuse — dates, times, locations, injuries, messages, photographs — in a form that can later support a protective order, a criminal case, or a survivor’s own sense of what happened. Advocates note that contemporaneous records carry weight precisely because memory and isolation are eroded by abuse. Purpose-built tools such as VictimsVoice illustrate the genre: a password-protected progressive web app (deliberately not an installable icon, so an abuser sees no “receipt” on the phone) that prompts for the structured details courts expect, and that markets compliance with HIPAA, VAWA, VOCA and FVPSA. Where evidence is meant for legal use, questions of authentication and chain of custody — proving a record is what it claims to be and was not altered — become central.

This documentation directly supports Reporting and Disclosure and is the feature most associated with Reporting Apps. But it sits in sharp tension with Privacy and Safety: a database of abuse evidence on a survivor’s device is exactly what makes it dangerous if discovered, which is why Discreet Access and disguised storage are recurring design responses to Tech-Enabled Abuse. The Datafication of MeToo critique adds a further caution — that “building evidence” is also building data capital, and that the narratives such tools render legible are shaped by the institutions, not only the survivors, they serve.

In this vault

Sources

Tags: #concept #evidence #documentation

reporting-apps

Reporting Apps

Reporting apps are anti-violence tools whose primary purpose is not to summon help in the moment but to document and report incidents of Gender-Based Violence — building a record or evidence trail against a perpetrator, sometimes with AI chatbots for triage and education. They sit closer to the justice system than Personal Safety Apps, which makes their handling of data especially consequential: see Datafication of MeToo for a critique of how the data they generate becomes capital and entangles users with the Criminal Legal System.

In this vault

sexual-violence

Sexual Violence

Sexual violence is defined by the WHO as any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting. It spans a wide continuum — rape and attempted rape, sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact, sexual coercion, sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, forced marriage, and the denial of contraception or sexual-health protection. Because consent is central, the defining feature is the absence of freely given agreement rather than the presence of physical force. It can be perpetrated by an intimate partner — overlapping with Intimate Partner Violence — or by acquaintances and strangers (non-partner sexual violence).

It is a major and persistently under-reported form of Gender-Based Violence. WHO estimates that about 8% of women aged 15 and over (roughly 263 million) have experienced non-partner sexual violence at least once since age 15, and that around 31.6% of women worldwide have experienced partner violence or non-partner sexual violence over their lifetime. Children are also heavily affected: a 2023 global analysis estimated lifetime prevalence of childhood sexual violence at about 18.9% for girls and 14.8% for boys. Stigma, fear and disbelief mean recorded figures substantially understate the true scale, shaping how survivor-centred Reporting and Disclosure tools must be designed.

In this vault

Sources

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12100463/

Tags: #concept #violence