With #metoo movement sexual assault has been in public discussion lately and it is about time we figure a way to end this! These assaults on campuses are the worst a kid has to face where it should be have been a safe learning environment. The stats, in US campuses, are truly unbelievable:
- One in 5 women or on in 13 men are assaulted
- Less than 10% report to school or police, even that after a long wait, as you can imagine it takes lot of courage to do it. There are lot of reasons why the reporting numbers are so low: shame & community perception, not clear on what is considered an assault and the laws vary from state to state, and of course lack of proper reporting mechanisms that minimize re-living the trauma
- 90% of offenders are repeat offenders and this happens because they never get reported after the first assault
This problem has existed for generations, finally Jessica Ladd, has figured out a way leverage online technologies to develop a system what can be called as ‘Information Escrow’, named aptly Callisto! You can create a time stamped document of the assault and it will be saved until the same perpetrator appears in someone else’s report, then the attacks are reported to police/school.
Genius idea! They ran successful tests in 13 campuses and are planning to expand to all soon! We wish them good luck. Hopefully Callisto becomes very popular and solves the problem on campuses. Is there any other aspect of the problem that is not covered? Lets see what happens, meanwhile do not stop keep working on this as we need many creative ideas to solve this problem as there lot more campuses to cover and not to mention eventually to solve the same problem in a workplace setting.
Good luck to all the Pieneers! As always, know of anyone or any startup working on this, please let me know, I will update this post.
[Image Credit: Thanks to StockSnap via Pixabay]
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