“The Safest Woman Alive”

Reference: Linnea Öhlund & Angelika Strohmayer (2025). “‘The Safest Woman Alive’: A Reflection on Interpersonal Safety Technologies for Gendered Violence Protection.” CHI EA ’25: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article 651, pp. 1–11. DOI 10.1145/3706599.3716240. (alt.chi)

Summary

A critical, feminist reflection on how HCI designs against gendered violence (GV). The paper opens with a satirical prologue — a woman dressing for a walk who straps on a body sensor, a “smart girl security system” belt, smart-foot devices, multiple panic wristbands, a tazer-watch, a filming ring, pepper-spray GPS sticks, and a dozen “safe route” / panic-button / evidence-recording apps — each one drawn from a real published HCI safety project. The absurd accumulation makes the argument: HCI over-engages with interpersonal safety technologies, loading the burden of protection onto potential victim-survivors and treating a socio-political problem as a personal, gadget-shaped one.

To reframe the field, the authors apply Patricia Hill Collins’ Four Domains of Power (structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, interpersonal) and show that almost every device in their prologue addresses only the interpersonal domain — and mostly the hyper-visible case of stranger street harassment — when the most common GV is intimate-partner and hidden. They warn that such designs are techno-solutionist and can be victim-blaming, demand normative bodies and “correct” use, and rest on unreliable tech (facial/emotion recognition). They call for HCI to design across all four domains — including for perpetrators and structural change — in allyship with support services, and offer a reflective framework spanning a trajectory “from gadgets to critique.”

Key ideas

The burden of GV prevention is wrongly placed on women and gender-nonconforming people, not the institutions and perpetrators upholding violence.
The Four Domains of Power is a usable reflective tool: map which level your intervention actually addresses.
Most safety tech targets the visible interpersonal domain (stranger danger), missing the structural, disciplinary, and hegemonic domains.
“Safe route” routing encodes whose safety counts (ACLU backlash to Microsoft’s version); emotion/face recognition is unreliable and non-inclusive.
Reporting/mapping platforms (Harassmap, Hollaback / Right To Be, Protibadi) gain power from activist use, not data collection alone.
Uses “gendered violence” rather than “violence against women and girls” to include queer and gender-nonconforming people.

Connections

CritiquesPersonal Safety Apps
CritiquesTechno-Solutionism
IntroducesFour Domains of Power
AddressesGender-Based Violence
DiscussesReporting Apps
Informed byFeminist HCI
Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Related toDatafication of MeToo
- Companion critique: both read anti-violence tech through power and political economy.

Sources

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706599.3716240

Tags: #research #critical #hci #feminist #gendered-violence

Backlinks

Linked Pages

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

trauma-informed-design

Trauma-Informed Design

Trauma-informed design builds tools around the realities of people who have experienced violence: defaults that fail safe, control left in the user’s hands, language that validates rather than directs, and the assumption that a device may be monitored. It is closely tied to Survivor-Centered Design and underpins discreet, dignified experiences. Insight Exchange’s resources — My Safety Kit, Responders Lab, No Hidden Door — are practical expressions of the approach.

In this vault

feminist-hci

Feminist HCI

Feminist HCI is the subfield of human-computer interaction that brings feminist theory, critical theory, and standpoint epistemology to bear on how interactive systems are conceived, built, and evaluated. Its founding statement is Shaowen Bardzell’s 2010 CHI paper Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design, which offered both contribution criteria (theory, methodology, user research, evaluation) and a “constellation” of feminist interaction design qualities — pluralism, participation, advocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure — meant to guide and assess design as it unfolds. The agenda extends to questions usually left implicit in HCI: scientific objectivity, whose values get encoded, how data is collected and interpreted, designer reflexivity, and the unintended consequences of the systems we ship.

The lineage runs forward into Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice (2020), which frames design as operating within a “matrix of domination” and argues for processes led by, not merely consulted with, marginalised communities — showing, for example, how normative design erases trans and disabled users. For anti-violence technology, feminist HCI supplies the theoretical backbone of Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design: it names power, insists on participation, and treats embodiment and lived experience as design knowledge. It also grounds critique of Techno-Solutionism and of safety tools that ignore how systems are situated in real relationships of Gender-Based Violence and Coercive Control.

In this vault

Sources

https://des4div.library.northeastern.edu/bardzell-feministhci/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_HCI
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043458/design-justice/

Tags: #concept #theory #hci

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

gender-based-violence

Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence (GBV) is violence directed at a person because of their gender, or that affects one gender disproportionately. It is the umbrella over Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Violence, Stalking and Coercive Control — the harms the tools and resources in this vault aim to prevent, interrupt, document or respond to.

In this vault

IncludesIntimate Partner Violence
IncludesSexual Violence
IncludesCoercive Control
IncludesDomestic Family and Sexualised Violence

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

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.

In this vault

Critiqued byFour Domains of Power
Tension withPersonal Safety Apps

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.

In this vault

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

intimate-partner-violence

Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is defined by the WHO as behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm — including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours. It is the most common form of Domestic Violence and is best understood not as isolated assaults but as an ongoing pattern of domination; the surveillance, isolation and monitoring of Coercive Control are often the core of the abuse rather than incidental to it. This is also why Tech-Enabled Abuse is so potent in IPV: an abuser with shared accounts, devices and location data has ready-made tools for control.

IPV is strikingly prevalent. WHO estimates that about 25.8% of ever-partnered women aged 15–49 have experienced physical and/or sexual IPV at least once in their lifetime, making it the most widespread form of Gender-Based Violence against women. The Lancet’s 2018 global analysis similarly found roughly one in four ever-partnered women affected over their lifetime, with around 13% reporting partner violence in the past year. IPV is also a leading context for femicide: a large share of women killed worldwide die at the hands of an intimate partner.

In this vault

Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
Related toCoercive Control
Related toDomestic Violence
Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse

Sources

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02664-7/fulltext

Tags: #concept #violence