crisis-hotlines-and-resources

Crisis Hotlines and Resources

Crisis hotlines and resources are the human-staffed support infrastructure behind much anti-violence technology — the warm referral that an app’s “get help” button should ultimately reach. In the US the National Domestic Violence Hotline offers free, confidential support by phone (1-800-799-SAFE), online chat, and text in over 200 languages, while the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline provides a broader mental-health crisis line. Confidentiality is the defining feature: domestic-violence service providers operate under strict rules that sharply limit what can be shared with outside parties, because a leak can be life-threatening for a survivor. This is precisely why a hotline disclosure differs from a report to the Criminal Legal System — the survivor controls what happens next.

NNEDV’s Safety Net Project sits at the intersection these notes care about, working on how technology affects the safety, privacy, accessibility, and civil rights of victims, and publishing survivor-facing guidance on Stalkerware, Location Tracking Abuse, and device security. Most Personal Safety Apps embed hotline numbers or resource directories, and tools like Circle of 6 and My Safety Kit are built around connecting users to trusted help rather than replacing it. The design principle is that technology should route toward — not substitute for — confidential human support; treating an app as a stand-in for a hotline is a form of Techno-Solutionism.

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Tags: #concept #crisis-hotlines #resources

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techno-solutionism

Techno-Solutionism

Techno-solutionism is the assumption that complex social and political problems can be fixed with technology. In anti-violence tech it shows up as the belief that the right gadget or app can “prevent sexual assault” or “ensure the safety of women” — a framing critiqued at length in The Safest Woman Alive and Datafication of MeToo. The danger is twofold: it shifts the burden of prevention onto victim-survivors (who must buy, learn, and correctly use devices), and it draws attention and funding away from structural change addressed by the other Four Domains of Power.

This is the central tension running through the vault: tools can genuinely help in a crisis, but should be weighed against Trauma-Informed Design, feminist critique, and the limits of what design alone can do.

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Critiqued byFour Domains of Power
Tension withPersonal Safety Apps

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.

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Tags: #concept #reporting #disclosure

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.

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Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Subjected toGender-Based Violence

personal-safety-apps

Personal Safety Apps

Personal safety apps are mobile applications that help a user summon help, share their whereabouts, or deter harm. Most combine a Panic Button, Location Sharing, and a Trusted Network, and many connect to Crisis Hotlines and Resources. They span two broad postures: alarm-and-summon tools aimed at acute danger, and network-and-intervene tools rooted in Bystander Intervention that aim to prevent harm before it escalates.

The central design tension is Privacy and Safety: the same capabilities that protect (continuous location, contact lists, always-on microphones) can be turned against a user — see Location Tracking Abuse and Stalkerware — so survivor-facing tools must be weighed with Trauma-Informed Design in mind.

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Member apps assert instance_of::[[Personal Safety Apps]]; see backlinks.

my-safety-kit

My Safety Kit

Insight Exchange (DVSM) · Reflection resource (booklet + animations + decision-making tool) · Free

Summary

My Safety Kit is a reflection resource from Insight Exchange for people who are, or may be, experiencing domestic, family and sexualised violence. Rather than triggering an alarm, it supports a person “at their pace, at their lead” with information and reflection questions about how they see their situation and what they might be weighing as they look ahead. It includes a decision-making tool and reflection questions across areas of wellbeing — material basics / economic wellbeing, love and connection, participation, learning, physical and mental health, and safety — and is available as a booklet (including a My Safety Kit Aotearoa edition) with short introductory animations.

It is accompanied by de-identified lived-experience insights (e.g. “Sam” and “Alex”) that map real experiences against the kit’s focus areas, illustrating what a person may be doing — or not doing — to stay safe and well within their relationship.

Connections

Produced byInsight Exchange
Informed byTrauma-Informed Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
SupportsRisk Assessment
- Self-directed reflection rather than an actuarial checklist.
AddressesDomestic Family and Sexualised Violence
AddressesEconomic Abuse

Sources

https://www.insightexchange.net/my-safety-kit/

Tags: #resource #reflection #lived-experience

circle-of-6

Circle of 6

Tech 4 Good (Nancy Schwartzman, Christine Corbett Moran, Thomas Cabus) · iOS (Feb 2012) / Android (Sept 2012) · Free · Active (founding lead developer departed 2015)

Summary

Circle of 6 is a bystander-style personal-safety app for preventing dating violence and sexual assault, built on the premise that the fastest help is often a trusted friend. A user picks six people for their “circle”; from then on, two taps sends those contacts a pre-set message together with the user’s GPS location — for example “come and get me,” “call and interrupt me,” or a request for advice. The app also links directly to reputable domestic-violence and national hotlines, and originally invited contacts to take a Facebook pledge to help stop violence before it happens.

It was co-created by filmmaker and activist Nancy Schwartzman with developer Christine Corbett Moran (lead developer / CTO until 2015) and Thomas Cabus, under the umbrella “Tech 4 Good.” A university edition, Circle of 6 U, customised the trusted-resource links per campus; the team ran a two-year pilot with colleges including Williams. The app reported over 15,000 downloads within its first months and wide press coverage.

Recognition

WonApps Against Abuse Challenge
- Co-winner with On Watch of the White House / HHS challenge, announced November 2011.

Safety features

ImplementsTrusted Network
- Exactly six pre-chosen contacts — small, intimate, low-friction.
ImplementsPanic Button
- Two taps to send a pre-set message.
ImplementsLocation Sharing
- GPS location attached to the alert.

location-tracking-abuse

Location Tracking Abuse

Location tracking abuse is the covert or coercive use of a person’s geolocation against them — through GPS apps, “find my” services, shared family-plan settings, vehicle telematics in smart cars, or cheap Bluetooth trackers slipped into a bag or car. It is the dark inversion of Location Sharing: the very mechanism that lets a Panic Button say “come and get me, here” becomes, in an abuser’s hands, a way to know where a Victim-Survivor is at all times. NNEDV’s Safety Net Project warns that in some tragic cases GPS devices and apps have aided an offender in locating a victim to commit murder, or were enabled without the victim’s knowledge. It is a core tactic of Coercive Control and a primary engine of Stalking.

The tracking can be installed directly via Stalkerware, surfaced through accounts the abuser still controls, or carried out with commodity hardware never designed for surveillance — a problem severe enough that Bluetooth trackers like AirTags prompted dedicated anti-stalking detection features and Congressional attention. Because removing a tracker can signal to an abuser that they have “lost control” and trigger escalation, technology safety planning treats discovery and removal as something to do carefully with an advocate, not impulsively. This is why location features in Personal Safety Apps such as Círculo encrypt position data and send it only to a Trusted Network, rather than logging or exposing it.

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stalkerware

Stalkerware

Stalkerware (or spouseware) is commercially available monitoring software — often marketed for “parental control” or “employee monitoring” — installed covertly on a victim’s device to read messages, track location, and capture activity. It is the sharp edge of Tech-Enabled Abuse: a consumer app turned instrument of Coercive Control and Stalking. Any safety tool that stores sensitive data on a device an abuser can access must treat stalkerware as part of its threat model — one reason Discreet Access and minimal data retention matter.

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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