true crime

A Tinder-style website is revolutionising the way women can report rape.

 

Whether out of fear, embarrassment or trauma, the fact remains that most rape survivors don’t report the crime to police. But one woman is hoping to change that, and she’s harnessing the power of technology to do it.

Jessica Ladd has created a Callisto, a website that allows sexual assault victims to log the details of their attack in a third-party system, then either store them via a time-stamped report or to forward them on to the relevant authorities.

The concept is designed to make it simpler and less traumatic for victims to come forward. But the really revolutionary aspect of the site is that it offers users the option to see if their attacker matches another victim’s.

“Knowing that you weren’t the only one changes everything,” Ladd told news.com.au. “It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator. It means that if you do come forward you’ll have someone else’s back and they’ll have yours.”

Video via Now This

According to news.com.au, the 30-year-old was prompted to create the site because she found the experience of reporting her own assault “more traumatising than the assault itself”.

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Since being founded last year, Callisto has been adopted by several US colleges, which is promising given that as many as one in five women will be assaulted during their time on campus and 90 per cent of perpetrators will re-offend.

“If we can transform the reporting process into something that is actually empowering to an individual and gives them a decent chance of justice, then we’re not just helping survivors — we’re helping create a system where this is less likely to happen again,” she said.

Of course, the site has applications well beyond colleges (think workplaces and the military) and even well beyond US borders.

“Eventually, we want a Callisto-like system for every survivor in the United States,” Ladd said. “We’ve open-sourced our code in the hope that people can build similar systems in other countries.”

While Ladd told news.com.au that her message to victims was that they are not alone, she also had a few words of advice to the perpetrators.

“Apologise, beg their forgiveness, promise that you’ve learned your lesson and will never do it again, and then do just that — learn your lesson and never do it again,” she said.

“If you just don’t care, if you think it’s acceptable to have sex with someone who hasn’t decided to have sex with you or isn’t able to make that decision, then know this — we are coming for you. And together, we will win.”

Watch Jessica’s TED talk below.

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