If you put 500 students in a room, there would be 200 different ways that they would feel most comfortable reporting sexual assault.
Last summer Daren Mooko heard a Pomona College student present that idea as part of her senior thesis. It resonated with him.
At the time, Pomona students had two choices: Meet with Mr. Mooko, who is an associate dean and the Title IX coordinator there, in person. Or submit an anonymous report online, which didn’t allow for much contact between his office and the student, he said.
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If you put 500 students in a room, there would be 200 different ways that they would feel most comfortable reporting sexual assault.
Last summer Daren Mooko heard a Pomona College student present that idea as part of her senior thesis. It resonated with him.
At the time, Pomona students had two choices: Meet with Mr. Mooko, who is an associate dean and the Title IX coordinator there, in person. Or submit an anonymous report online, which didn’t allow for much contact between his office and the student, he said.
He wanted to cast a wider net. So Pomona signed up for a yearlong pilot program with Callisto, a college sexual-assault reporting website. The site prompts users with questions and allows them to fill out a detailed report of their assault, which is time-stamped. Then, they choose whether and when to pass along that information to their institution.
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Reporting mechanisms like Callisto might encourage more people to come forward, and could be another tool for campus Title IX coordinators. Students already have various reporting options, both in person and often online, as required by Title IX. But the new web platforms offer features — like independence from college campuses, and data-collection capabilities — that their supporters say allow more nuanced insights into the realities of campus sexual assault.
Several Title IX coordinators see drawbacks in the new technology, however. Some of them say systems that involve third parties could pose privacy concerns, or might erect a barrier between their offices and the people they want to reach. And some colleges might have to confront this new form of reporting whether they choose to or not.
How It Works
Jessica Ladd, a Pomona graduate and founder of Callisto, which was developed by the nonprofit Sexual Health Innovations, said the platform partly reflects what she wishes had been available for her when she was sexually assaulted in college. Though Callisto works in tandem with Title IX offices (Callisto signs contracts with colleges, and the site will operate on six campuses this fall), she wants students to see it as an independent option that carries lower stakes than reporting an assault in person.
The goal is to usher survivors into a nonthreatening space to tell their story, Ms. Ladd said, by first establishing trust and then nudging students to use their campus resources.
The site builds that trust by allowing students to log what happened as anonymous users, at first. Then, if and when they feel ready, they can verify their identities through their campus email accounts and send the information to their college. The information is stored on Callisto’s site regardless of whether students report or not, so they can return in the future. And to help identify repeat offenders, users can opt in to a matching system, which also allows a student to choose to have his or her assault information reported to the institution only if another student reports that he or she was assaulted by the same person. Students must verify their identities before opting in to the matching system or filing a report with their college, said Ms. Ladd, which acts as a safeguard against false or overstated reporting.
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Callisto and other systems like it can configure data on sexual assault in potentially illuminating ways for the campuses they serve. Mr. Mooko said he was surprised to learn that the Callisto site for Pomona got the most hits immediately before and after fall and spring break. That realization made him consider the ways he could time outreach and education to combat those seasonal upticks.
Lighthouse, another web-based reporting platform, also aggregates data to generate a more granular picture of sexual misconduct on a campus, said Luke Roopra, chief executive of the nonprofit and its parent company, Vertiglo Software. With the platform, users can log a range of misconduct — anything from catcalls to inappropriate touching to assault. Lighthouse can distill that information into common types, locations, and times so that administrators can pinpoint trends, Mr. Roopra said.
Throughout most of the reporting process, Lighthouse users never have to disclose their names. When creating an account, they choose a user name and input their ZIP code. To submit a report, they fill out a form and then select their university from a menu of options based on their geographic location. Every report is emailed to the Title IX coordinator at that university, and students can also choose whether to send the information to the campus police, local law enforcement, or the corresponding regional arm of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
They choose which officials to send their report to, what details to provide, and whether they ever want to reveal their identity. That’s appealing to students who want fast, convenient channels of communication but do not want to interact with administrators or the police in person, Mr. Roopra said.
Some campus administrators are concerned that this technology will lead to barrage of relatively low-level reports that their offices will have to sift through, Mr. Roopra said. But he tells them that “it’s OK, because you’ll be able to mine a lot of data and take the limited dollars that you have and apply it to a targeted area.”
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Questions of Privacy
Some colleges are bolstering their own technology to find avenues into the virtual world students inhabit. And while Title IX officers agree that any method that increases reporting is a generally a good thing, many are waiting and watching to see how third-party technology plays out.
Nanette M. Pasquarello, the Title IX coordinator at the State University of New York at Cortland, said she and her colleagues consider the minutiae of technology when trying to help students. They made sure their site loads even when users misspell “Title IX.” The sexual-assault resource site for the entire SUNY system has a special button users can click to exit the website and wipe their search history.
Ms. Pasquarello obsesses over those details, she said, because she wants to make it as simple as possible for students to contact her office directly. Right now, Ms. Pasquarello said, she is hesitant to embrace third-party reporting platforms, mainly because private student information would be routed to an organization outside the university.
“If there’s something that’s going to improve the flow of reporting, I’m all for it,” Ms. Pasquarello said. “But I am skeptical because it seems that that does add a noncontrollable barrier.”
If there’s something that’s going to improve the flow of reporting, I’m all for it.
Like SUNY Cortland, Duke University tries to make its resources as accessible and as widely known as possible to anyone who might need them, said Howard Kallem, the university’s Title IX coordinator. Mr. Kallem said he understood the possible benefits of this new technology. But if a student can enter information and then choose not to send it to the university, he said, it could disconnect that student from the people on campus who can help with some of the more immediate problems survivors of sexual assault often encounter.
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“We don’t have the opportunity to reach out to that student to provide counseling, to provide housing modifications, to help them with the final exam that’s coming up in a couple of weeks and they’re so overwhelmed with the trauma that they can’t study,” Mr. Kallem said. “They’re on their own.”
Heather Cowan, the Title IX coordinator at the University of New Mexico, said her main concern about third-party reporting lies in those systems’ reliance on anonymity. (Callisto requires students to identify themselves when they pass along information, but Lighthouse does not.)
Her office received roughly 150 reports of alleged Title IX violations last year. More than half were one- or two-sentence descriptions sent along without a name, and Ms. Cowan said she worried that adding another layer of quick, anonymous reporting could be “one more thing that we, as a university, may not be able to do too much about.”
Regardless of whether campuses want to use this technology, some might not have a choice. The Lighthouse website lists 35 “pre-selected” campuses where it says that students can submit reports. But many of Title IX coordinators at those campuses said they did not have any relationship with the website. (Lighthouse is a tool for students, not colleges, Mr. Roopra said: “This is student-driven.”)
Butterfly Blaise is the Title IX coordinator at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh and had never heard of Lighthouse until a report landed in her inbox. As she clicked through, she realized that none of the people involved were ever students at Plattsburgh, and she concluded the report was meant for someone else.
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Based on her experience, Ms. Blaise worries that students who use this platform would be discouraged from future reporting if they have a poor experience and are unable to make contact with the people they want to, she said.
“And then they have this thought that somebody didn’t respond, or what they expected to happen did not,” Ms. Blaise said. “There are a lot of unanswered questions.”
Trusting in the Process
Students can also see the potential benefits and pitfalls that reporting websites could offer them.
Faith Ferber, a senior at American University, said she recently filed a federal Title IX complaint against her university over the handling of her sexual-assault complaint. She said that some students are afraid to report because they do not believe their campuses will respond appropriately, so third-party reporting could “put a little more trust back into the process.”
Cecelia Gonzalez, a sexual-assault survivor and University of Nevada at Las Vegas graduate, said that ultimately it’s the university, and not the reporting mechanism, that matters.
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“Whether you’re doing it anonymously on a website or you’re sending a direct email, if your school doesn’t do anything with that, you’re still in the same place,” Ms. Gonzalez said.
Whether you’re doing it anonymously on a website or you’re sending a direct email, if your school doesn’t do anything with that, you’re still in the same place.
At the beginning of the pilot program with Callisto, Pomona’s Mr. Mooko said he hoped its availability would circumvent some of those reasons that students and advocates say they are uncomfortable with the traditional reporting process. If a student at Pomona became overwhelmed, she could hit “save” and finish later instead of plowing through a difficult conversation, he said. If she did not want to repeat herself, she would only have to tell her story once, to a computer screen.
Mr. Mooko has yet to receive a direct report from Callisto. But several students saved information in the system, and a handful of them opted in to the matching program. And one student recorded her report on the website and then printed it out to share with him when she went to his office, “kind of like Callisto lite,” he said.
Though Mr. Mooko doesn’t know which students are using the technology, he is thankful they found a welcoming place to go when they needed it, he said. And that information is there, saved and accessible, if they ever decide they want someone else to know. Most students Mr. Mooko has spoken to at Pomona feel the same way: They have not had a reason to go on the site, they tell him, but they are glad it’s there.
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.