To Prevent Sexual Assault, White House Issues Challenge: Build an App

July 13, 2011, 5:36 pm

The Obama administration’s latest effort to stem sexual abuse on college campuses borrows heavily from the onetime iPhone slogan: “there’s an app for that.”

Or, there should be, say executives. Today the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a contest to develop a smartphone app to help students better protect themselves in risky situations. The effort is dubbed Apps Against Abuse.

The competition calls for developers to build an app that lets women designate friends or emergency contacts and check in with them during at-risk situations. The app would also provide fast access to information and resources for dealing with sexual assault or dating violence. HHS will announce the winner on October 31 and feature the app on its Web site.

“Everyone has a role to play in the prevention of violence and abuse,” Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary of health and human services, said in a prepared statement. “This application can be another way to encourage young women and men to take an active role in the prevention of dating violence and sexual assault.”

The administration’s previous efforts on the issue have focused on challenging colleges to improve their responses to sexual assault, such as the U.S. Education Department’s controversial and far-reaching “Dear Colleague” letter.

Kimber J. Nicoletti-Martinez, director of multicultural efforts to end sexual assault at Purdue University, said she is intrigued by the idea of enlisting young people themselves, armed with their smartphones.

“It seems good to engage technology in prevention, especially since people with the higher risk factor like to communicate through technology,” she said. “I think it’s better than not having any plan.”

However, she added, an app that calls on female students to take preventative measures has its shortcomings. It relies on women recognizing when they are at risk and does not change the attitude that the burden to avoid assault is on women.

“Maybe people could add more components to it to ask people to confront their beliefs,” about what causes sexual assault, she said—like building an app that resembles Angry Birds. “Is there some kind of bird you can fling against misogynistic attitudes?”

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manoflamancha

You mean straw women, eh?
http://terrypbrock.com Terry Brock

How about a website called “Men against Abuse”. That will go much further in ending sexual assault. Maybe important men like our president make videos about what it means to be a real man by respecting women and speaking out against misogyny. That would be a real step forward.
dale1

I believe there are groups such as the one you describe. Though not a member, I am in full consonance with these aims. There’s no excuse for abuse, regardless of circumstance.

It would be interesting to see the response of the far right to what you’re suggesting, Terry. Seems to me that whatever Obama is for, most of the right is against, no matter what.

I would like to see people like LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, etc., go out and put their significant public images toward this effort.
collegeskeptic

How about an app called “Due Process” that helps students who are wrongfully accused and convicted of sexual assault find attorneys to sue their institutions?

Just kidding! Schools are pretty much bulletproof in court when it comes to wrongful discipline, and everyone knows that an anti-male response to a vaguely-defined, impossible-to-measure “sexual assault” crisis is more important than the rights of innocent people.
not4nothin

Am I wrong to infer, from the CHE headline, that if I do not create an app the White House will sexually assault me?
drjeff

> does not change the attitude that the burden to avoid assault is on women

DUH! The burden to avoid being the victim of a crime is on every law-abiding person. Assault is a crime; it should be the only one exempt from that rule? They don’t teach students how to avoid having their stuff stolen on campus?

And, by the way, men also have a burden to avoid assault; it’s just easier for us, for a variety of reasons, all related to Biology.

A theoretical question: if I were to (theoretically!) suggest that it might be silly to expect much display of logic from a “director of multicultural efforts to end sexual assault,” would that make me racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, anti-intellectual, elitist, muslim-hating, or what?
drjeff

This is a totally fine idea. The difficulty is that most abusers don’t think of themselves as abusers. I don’t know how many abusers would have the patience for the education/thinking needed to realize they are. (“Hey! I’m one of the guys they’re talking about”).

Like every crime, the intended victim still needs to prevent it. This is actually not a bad idea; sort of like a LoJack for your friend. I totally would have done that (and maybe suggested it) for my female friends when I was an undergrad.
drjeff

No points for stating the obvious. Sorry.
katisumas

all of the above….
bghansel

Is this different from having your best friend’s number on speed-dial? Or remembering 911? I fail to understand what this app can do or how it helps at all and wonder how many women in at risk situations would be able to make a phone call at that moment.
drjeff

I think the idea is that when someone attacks you, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to call 911 until they’re done (presuming they leave you conscious). You picked up on this little fact.*

But if, for example (I’ll go ahead and offer an obvious design here) the app beeps every 5 minutes and makes you put in a code (one for “I’m good” and a different one for “call help”), and you either put in the “call help” code or else ignore it, it can send an SOS text to your designated “friends” with your location (from the built-in GPS). Even this (fairly primitive) app would be about a million times better than what most students have now to keep themselves safe when they go out (or in) with someone. (Yes, I know: if the attacker were a little clever, (s)he would just smash the phone and defeat it; that’s why I called it “primitive.”)

BTW, I don’t see any reason why it’s reasonable to assume only female persons would benefit from or use such an app. It seems, NOT theoretically, that the “director of multicultural efforts to end sexual assault” was actually being sexist in assuming that.

* Let’s not even get started on the Supreme Court decision that police cannot be blamed for failing to stop an attack in progress, even if they know about it. Let’s just say it’s campus police, and they’re not unionized, and they know the University president himself will fire them if they don’t stop an assault in progress.
oh_richard

How about a “Dude! You’re Being A D***” app? It would help some men avoid saying and doing certain things… sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. modules would be available to “gift” to the recipient…
teapartydoc

I’m so happy that the administration is DOING something about this problem rather than Just striking a pose like so many do when they say,”Something should be done about that,” you know, the way it always begins with some shallow manifesto, and when something finally is done the result is a mishmash that does nothing but cost money and make jobs for bureaucrats.

Like this inevitably will.
guntar

This is the most infantilizing concept I can imagine. How exactly are apps going to help someone too clueless to call for help to begin with?? Are they going to be monitored 24 hours a day like toddlers?? Anyone that needs this is clearly a child that needs to be living at home with their parents, rather than out in the world with other people.
And by the way, assuming boys are the problem is totally misandrist, completely discriminatory against anyone without a womb. Tolerance? Hah.
http://twitter.com/jvward John Ward

Is there also a “director of monocultural efforts to end sexual assualt” at Purdue? Is the “director of multicultural efforts to end sexual assualt” title kept in lower-case letters in a nod to bell hooks or e.e. cummings? Or is it just that Purdue has a rule that a certain percentage of administrative positions (maybe all of them?) needs to have the term “multicultural” in the title?
twocommonwealths

It pains me to sound so Student Affairs-y, but doesn’t this seem like a nod to the notion that this generation of college students (I’m not much older) relies far too heavily on electronic communication? How about some good old-fashioned bystander intervention? “OMG Krystal didn’t text me, so like, I bet she’s like, totally not okay!” OR you could just go up to your friend who is drunk at a party, getting fondled by some creepy sober dude, and take her home.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the app has merits (like those highlighted by previous posters), but let’s not forget about the piece of preventing sexual assault that already fails to happen far too often.

And is it too much to ask in the year 2011 to not specify that the app is for women? Yes, women get sexually assault WAY more often than men. But maybe the author of this article (or the White House– not sure who assigned the single-sex usage of the app) should be the target of the Angry Birds against misogyny.
drjeff

Cool! But you’d have to be able to give someone a “gift” module anonymously. Some of these guys, I wouldn’t want them to know it was me…
drjeff

The difficulty here, I think, is that students want to be free to hook up with the hot person they just met, and want to avoid the consequences of that highly risky decision.

The administration, rather than acting like mature adults and saying it’s a thoroughly bad idea, wants to act like their friends, and say it’s okay, as long as you use a condom and have an app to keep you safe from attack.

Guntar (above) calls the attitude “infantilizing,” and while that is probably the word I use most often when discussing our campus’ attitude towards students, it’s maybe not the best choice here. What’s the word for “insisting on treating children as though they were adults, even when it’s painfully obvious they haven’t the capacity to act like adults for more than a few minutes at a time”?

And, yes, it IS too much to ask… On my campus, I have never heard someone who self-identified as a “feminist” who didn’t speak like a raging misogynist: if men have one thing, and women have another, the one the women have MUST be inferior, because…it’s the one the women have!
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IA22QLFFJNFHVCEEKQG5ZRLCPA Erik

I have a suggestion for an app. Well, not really an app, since it’s partly mechanical. It’s based on Angry Birds but in RL. When someone attempts to rape you, you pull out the gadget, and it throws a heavy bird-like leaden object at the would-be rapist, seriously damaging them to the point where they probably can’t continue trying to rape you.
It’s called a ‘gun’.
stephana

Just buy a gun and waste the perp! It is a lot more efficient except for the perp.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mikael-Hallin/100001043431563 Mikael Hallin

If only there was a small handheld device that they could carry, that could sent metal at high velocity into the vital organs of the women’s attackers…
shar9019

“However, she added, an app that calls on female students to take preventative measures has its shortcomings.”

This wording will only increase victim blaming and self-guilt in the event of an assault. While all potential crime victims can take action to reduce their risk, no victim can take any action that will prevent a crime. The only person who can truly prevent a crime is the person who’s going to commit it–by changing their course of action.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mikael-Hallin/100001043431563 Mikael Hallin

Wrong: There’s a whole world of difference between a fully completed crime and an attempted one, especially for the would be victim. High velocity lead is a great way to achieve this.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mikael-Hallin/100001043431563 Mikael Hallin

Better to rely on a 1911 than a call to 911. ;)
dale1

The White House attempts to do something to solve a problem using technology that people have in their pockets, equally accessible to men and women, and your solution is to put more guns on the streets. Fantastic. Sadly you sound like those folks who have the same solution to every problem. Economy too enemic, lower taxes! Country needs stimulus, lower taxes! Businesses leaving, lower taxes!

We’ve heard this before, and thankfully not many are buying.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mikael-Hallin/100001043431563 Mikael Hallin

Fact of the matter is, the most scary thing to a criminal is a non-victim, someone who has the means to defend themselves, and if they become a substantial part of the population(say 10-20%), the criminals risk/reward evaluation process will mean a lot less will perform those crimes, it’s a much greater deterant than the law(which criminals by definition don’t obey) and its possible punishment if caught, so yes I DO want more guns on the streets, in the hands of the law abiding. Being aware is one thing that can put them in less dangerous situations, but fighting back is the only thing that will save these women if they are targeted. A cellphone app isn’t going to do them any good. It’s profoundly stupid to think otherwise.

Also, I am not even right-wing, the political compass puts me more left than ghandi and nelson mandela, were my closest matches). (-8.25, -4.72)
dale1

@Mikeal Hallin: Yes, Gandhi and Mandela. Two figures who no doubt would have wanted others to resort to violence with deadly weapons in advance of their aims.

And by the way, I expect a cell phone with this app is a good deterrent, considering it’s much easier to obtain than a firearm, much easier to use, and much less likely to harm others. It may be true that it won’t stop an attacker, but neither will a weapon without its proper use.
drjeff

You seem to misunderstand what “deterrent” is and how they work. Remember the scene in Dr. Strangelove, when the President screams that a deterrent only works if the other side knows about it? (If you don’t, hide your head in shame until you’ve seen the film at least 3 times.)

What would you have people with that app do? Sew a patch onto their clothes (pro)claiming that they have the app? Hold their phone out like a shield, with the app showing? If you have any non-ridiculous ideas, let’s hear them…
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mikael-Hallin/100001043431563 Mikael Hallin

The best-case scenario for the app is that it starts the manhunt for the rapist faster, so there’s a bigger chance to catch him. It won’t do squat to actually protect the victim.
knano

Nothing can completely stop sexual violence and so much must be done to the victims. But today’s technology can help and sometimes have a further possibility in extreme cases can save lives. In Italy in 2011 there have been many cases of sexual violence that have caused the death of the victim. In any case, an Italian developer has developed an iPhone application Called “SOSave-helpme” http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sosave-HelpMe/id444754232?mt=8. The application can be used in all cases of extreme danger. SOSave-Helpme is unobtrusive and invisible, silent therefore indicated particularly in cases of violent assault.
http://terrypbrock.com Terry Brock

There are certainly a number of these groups. The White Ribbon Campaign is one. As for the far right, I certainly hope there wouldn’t be any negative response to the concept that real men don’t hit women or rape. I find that most men I talk to are in agreement with those statements: the real challenge is making them realize that men are wanted and needed in the conversation.
jfriedel

Romano is correct; CA ccs do not keep their tuition/fees revenues