Rena Bivens & Amy Adele Hasinoff. Information, Communication, and Society. Volume 21, Issue 8, 2018.
This study of mobile phone apps designed to prevent sexual violence (n = 215) is a quantitative analysis of all their features (n = 807). We analyze the intended users (victims, bystanders, and perpetrators) and rape prevention strategies of each feature, finding that anti-rape app design generally reinforces and reflects pervasive rape myths, by both targeting potential victims and reinforcing stranger-danger. To demonstrate that these limitations are primarily cultural rather than technological, we conclude by imagining apps with similar technical features that resist rather than reinforce rape myths. This study offers an empirical investigation of the relationship between technical design and social norms, and a unique methodology for uncovering the ideologies that underlie design.
Introduction
Sexual violence has recently been the focus of government and media attention in the USA. From public service announcements and Title IX investigations to online and offline activist campaigns, there is a renewed conversation about this ubiquitous social problem. Technology developers have responded as well; over 200 mobile phone applications designed to prevent sexual violence are available in the App Store and Google Play. Some were developed in response to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ ‘Apps Against Abuse’ initiative, which challenged developers ‘to harness the power of mobile technology to help prevent dating violence and abuse’ (HHS Press Office, 2011). The winning apps, Circle of 6 and OnWatch, both help potential victims alert friends or law enforcement to come to their aid.
New technologies, including these mobile phone apps, are often imagined to offer unique and innovative solutions to social problems. In the press release for the Apps Against Abuse initiative, US Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra said: ‘They give me great hope that we will invent our way towards a safer society’ (HHS Press Office, 2011). This sentiment is rooted in a familiar narrative that technological development can usher in justice, equality, and prosperity (Gillespie, 2003). From rape whistles to recent inventions such as nail polish that detects date-rape drugs, anti-rape underwear, and female condoms with teeth (Gibson, 2014), anti-rape apps are part of a long history of technological solutions to sexual violence.
In this context, this paper examines if and how mobile apps can address sexual violence. Our research questions are as follows:
(RQ1) What kind of features do mobile apps designed to prevent sexual violence provide for users?
(RQ2) What ideas about the nature, cause, and prevention of this social problem do those features reflect?
To answer these questions, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the rape prevention strategies that the features of these apps offer, and we use these data to investigate the relationship between technical design and social norms. We find that anti-rape app design generally reinforces and reflects pervasive rape myths, both by targeting potential victims and by reinforcing stranger-danger. Given that code is not neutral but instead reflects social values (Lessig, 2006), app developers’ design choices reflect their assumptions about the cause and nature of a social problem such as sexual violence. We conclude with a discussion of potential anti-rape apps with the same kinds of features as our set that would reflect the violence prevention literature and resist rape myths. By examining all the features in a comprehensive set of apps designed for one particular social problem, this study offers a unique empirical methodology for uncovering the ideologies that underlie design.
Sexual violence prevention and app design
Many researchers argue that since sexual violence is a social problem, eliminating it requires long-term systemic efforts to involve communities in changing pervasive and damaging assumptions about gender, sexuality, consent, and violence (WHO, 2010). Given that there are few well-established and consistently effective sexual violence prevention strategies (DeGue et al., 2014), mobile phone apps designed to address sexual violence face the same challenges as offline prevention programs.
Research on mobile phone apps for the prevention of sexual violence is just emerging (Ellcessor, 2016). There is some evidence that college students view their mobile phones as effective ‘weapons of self-defense’ and feel safer in public when carrying them (Cumiskey & Brewster, 2012; Nasar, Hecht, & Wener, 2007). The use of new media for sexual health promotion, such as reducing the rates of HIV and unplanned pregnancies, is more established in the literature (Guse et al., 2012). In general, these interventions use new media to provide information in hopes of promoting behavior change in individuals. For example, one study found that a series of SMS messages was effective in increasing knowledge about STIs, though not in increasing condom use (Lim et al., 2012). Some sexual violence prevention research uses the same approach, such as a program that uses new media to educate a college community about sexual harassment (Ramson, 2006).
Critics of particular anti-rape apps point out that they reproduce familiar rape myths and problems with existing prevention discourses. Mason and Magnet (2012) argue that the Apps Against Abuse initiative makes potential victims responsible for preventing violence rather than targeting potential perpetrators. McCaughey and Cermele argue that the Circle of 6 app, just like the standard rape prevention tips that came before it, ‘construct[s] women as physically and psychologically incapable of active resistance’ (2014, p. 248), which reinforces the idea that rape is inevitable and that women are always helpless to stop it themselves. Our study systematically analyzes the features in anti-rape apps to determine if these critiques apply to the set as a whole, a point to which we return in the Discussion.
Methods
App design both reproduces culture and, in turn, influences users. As Balsamo argues, ‘Through the practices of designing, cultural beliefs are materially reproduced, identities are established, and social relations are codified’ (2011, p. 3). Indeed, design creates a field of possibilities and ‘constitutes users as subjects’ (Bardzell, 2010, p. 1307), and as such has broad social implications. Building on Bardzell’s (2010) work bringing together feminism and human–computer interaction, we focus on design in order to ‘attend to the ways that design artifacts in-the-world reflexively design us’ (p. 1307). This study likewise builds on cultural studies of technology scholarship that highlight the importance of closely analyzing the ideologies embedded in design choices. Goggin (2011), for example, urges researchers to consider apps as ‘cultural platforms’ and another study examines the gender politics embedded in the way Facebook’s many gender options default to a binary in the database (Bivens, 2015). As Pauwels (2012) argues, Internet researchers should pay close attention to the cultural aspects and meanings of websites by studying their sonic, typographic, and other signifiers. Our study also builds on Lupton’s (2014) approach to critically analyzing health and medical apps as illustrative of which health problems are considered important and which prevention and care strategies are privileged. Lupton’s analysis of popular health apps as ‘sociocultural artifacts’ demonstrates that a critical analysis of apps can reveal the social and political currents that are translated into technology design.
Given all the well-intentioned attempts to reduce sexual violence through technological innovation, why have none meaningfully reduced the incidence of sexual violence? Focusing on design provides a unique insight into how social norms ‒ in this case, prevalent rape myths ‒ impact technological development. By examining the features and design choices for a large number of anti-rape apps, we gain an insight into the assumptions about sexual violence that are common among app developers. Design choices are limited by operating systems, hardware capabilities, app store policies, financial limitations, and other constraints, and often reflect input by many individuals. As such, while interviews with individual designers would tell us about their personal beliefs and intent, our interest is in the relationship between ideologies about sexual violence and the technologies that are actually produced out of the interaction between designers, organizations, devices, and mobile phone companies. As such, we focus on the features available in anti-rape apps and examine the social norms that underlie each feature’s affordances. As Gillespie (2003) explains, technological ‘affordances shape, urge, and constrain particular uses’ and do so in a particularly systematic way (p. 114).
We analyzed all the English-language mobile apps (n = 215) designed to prevent sexual violence that were available at the time of research, November 2014–February 2015. A list of all app names, developers, and websites is included in the supplemental data for this article. We identified and coded each feature (n = 807) in these apps, defining a ‘feature’ as an action, option, or setting afforded by the mobile app and accessible to the user (median features per app = 3). For each feature, we coded the type of action the feature enables users to take (e.g., alerting others or tracking the user’s location) and the type of rape prevention strategy (‘incident intervention’ or ‘education and awareness’). ‘Incident intervention’ features are designed for specific incidents of violence or longer term abusive relationships with a specific person. The majority of these features are geared toward alerting other people that an incident is happening. ‘Education and awareness’ features are designed to provide information about sexual violence or general awareness of risky relationships, people, and places. Education and awareness features focus on providing users with knowledge about how to recognize sexual violence, tips for how to deal with it, and strategies for sharing information about risky neighborhoods, suspicious people, or convicted sex offenders. While incident intervention features only work if an incident is happening, has just happened, or the user thinks an incident may happen, education and awareness features address the potential for a future incident to occur. Since designers anticipate particular types of users within the design process (Bardzell, 2010), we also coded each feature according to the intended user’s relationship to sexual violence (victim, perpetrator, or bystander).
To find apps, we began with the Apps Against Abuse campaign as well as a dozen other apps we were already familiar with. Using the descriptions of these apps, we developed a list of keywords and searched Apple’s App Store and the Google Play app store using the following 13 terms: prevent violence, violence prevention, risky situation, sexually assaulted, sexual assault, rape, sexual violence, dating violence, sexual abuse, domestic violence, abusive relationship, harassment, and bystander. The apps address many contexts: 39% include sexual assault alongside crises such as anonymous shooters and heart attacks, 33% solely target sexual violence, 21% address intimate partner violence, and 7% address harassment (including stalking and bullying). The apps were designed by 205 unique individuals or organizations, including universities and colleges, high schools, nonprofit organizations, former police officers, and military units.
Findings and analysis
Overall, 87% of features in our sample are designed for potential victims, 12% for bystanders, and 1% for perpetrators. Of the 807 features, most were designed for incident intervention (74%), while the remaining were education and awareness features (26%). In the analysis that follows, we offer an overview of features available for each kind of user and for each of the two prevention strategies.
Features for victims
Incident intervention features for victims
Most (80%) of the features for victims are designed to be used during a specific (ongoing or potential) incident. Of these incident intervention features, nearly half allow victims to alert other people or organizations that an incident is occurring, followed by features designed to monitor the app user’s location and/or environment for signs of an incident, and features to take evasive actions.
Alerting people and/or organizations
Over half of the features designed to alert others during an incident are focused on setting up and alerting a list of preset contacts and then sharing information about the incident with those contacts. Circle of 6 is a typical example, which asks users to choose 6 trusted individuals for their ‘circle.’ The app store page explains: ‘If you get into an uncomfortable or risky situation, use Circle of 6 to automatically send your circle a pre-programmed SMS alert message, with your exact location. It’s quick. It’s discreet. Two taps on your iPhone is all it takes’. Another common feature is a contact button for a hotline, which connects the user with local and national sexual assault centers, women’s shelters, university police, or simply 911. Check-in features enlist others to watch the app user’s movements, often through a live-stream of GPS data. For example, Watch Over Me, permits ‘your friends and family to “walk with you” virtually,’ while also sending push notifications ‘the moment you enter an area that is flagged as “high crime” so you know to be on high alert.’ With the timer feature, app users disable the app after a set amount of time has passed – if they do not, emergency contacts are notified and sent GPS and other data collected by the app.
Monitoring the user
The second most common incident intervention feature is the capacity to monitor the app user’s environment for signs that an incident is occurring, which often includes collecting evidence of an incident. GPS is by far the most common monitoring technique, followed by mapping, audio recording, and image capture. This information is often shared instantly with preselected contacts, but can also be stored for later use. For instance, an app called Self ‘monitors for a spike in the ambient sound decibel level (e.g., shouting), and automatically starts recording, saving an audio file in a secret folder.’
Two other feature types appear infrequently in our sample of apps but offer insight into the range of monitoring options available. An app called redEye uses geofencing (a virtual boundary using GPS) to automatically alert contacts if a user deviates from a suggested path or remains idle for too long. In conjunction with a check-in feature, the app Watch Over Me stops tracking users once they enter areas marked as ‘Home’ or ‘School/Office.’ A few apps also require a subscription to a professional monitoring service, such as MyForce.
Evasive actions
The third most common incident intervention feature type provides victims with actions they can use during an incident. Stealth mode is the most common, including false home screens, hidden recordings, silent alerts, message systems embedded inside games, and duress PINs that users can input to make it seem that an emergency call has been cancelled. Other features include loud alarms, unique ways to set off the alarm (e.g., shaking the device or holding the volume button for three seconds), diversion calls, and blocked calls.
Education and awareness features for victims
Learning about sexual violence
Sixty-three percent of education-based features for victims offer static information, which includes information and statistics about sexual violence, warning signs, details about local resources and support organizations, and stress-reduction exercises. Safety tips and self-defense advice are also part of this feature set. One app, called Self Defense for Women – Don’t be another Statistic, offers tips such as ‘using perfume as a deterrent.’ An additional 19% are interactive information features, such as quizzes that are designed to help victims diagnose problems in their relationships.
Avoiding dangerous people and places
Some features offer interactive information such as the capacity to search through sex offender databases and receive push notifications about recent crimes or information about suspicious events uploaded by community members. For instance, RSO SAFE invites users to compare a photo to matching images of registered sex offenders with a ‘side-by-side photo display.’ Advice from Crime Maps encourages users to use the GPS feature ‘to find crimes in the region in order to avoid dangerous places.’ Likewise, Sex Offender Search recommends using the app ‘while you are viewing a house you are interested in [renting or buying] and the App’s map will show if any sex offenders are in the area.’ Other features enable users to share crime information on social networks organized by location, creating spaces for community-based surveillance via GPS and geofencing functions. For example, ‘Help other women in your city by reporting crimes that happen in your vicinity to Watch Over Me. These crime reports will then help alert other users when they are in dodgy areas of your city.’ Likewise, SafetiPin allows users to view and add details about the ‘Safety Score’ of an area and use ‘Audit Pins’ to ‘audit a neighborhood, report a feeling, or report personal harassment and hazards.’
Features for bystanders
Sixty-seven percent of features for bystanders are geared toward education and awareness. A range of bystanders are mentioned in app descriptions, including parents, military leaders, healthcare professionals, violence prevention leaders, and the general public. We first look at the features designed to help bystanders intervene.
Incident intervention for bystanders
Alerting other people and monitoring app users were the most popular features that enable bystanders to intervene in specific (actual or potential) incidents.
Reporting to other people
The most common incident intervention features for bystanders permit users to report evidence they have collected to authorities, often anonymously. Some evidence-reporting features are directed to specific contexts and communities. For instance, Report Child Sex Tourism and Trafficking in Trinbago are two apps naming specific contexts and BumpyCrowd facilitates ‘crowdmonitoring and crowdreporting’ within school environments.
Monitoring users and their environment
Monitoring features for bystanders, such as those for potential victims, enable evidence collection by storing details about suspicious people; taking photos, video, and audio; and noting the GPS location of witnessed incidents. For example, Live911 encourages users to ‘capture evidence if you see someone being bullied, harassed or abused, [or if you] witness domestic violence.’ Three apps for bystanders are designed for parents to monitor their children for signs of an incident. With FamilyConnect.net Mobile, all text messages sent or received from the monitored device are sent to the parent, including deleted messages. Other features include call logs, GPS pin tracking each time the phone has been used, notifications when ‘a potentially risky situation involving your child’ has been identified, and social network activity.
Bystander intervention resources
One app, R.I.S.E., is designed for bystanders to intervene more directly during an incident: ‘You identify and witness an incident of sexual violence but you’re unsure of what to do! Depending on where you are you can click on different campus settings that will upload a database of possible situations and tips for interventions & support!’ This app’s resource database offers suggestions for how the bystander could obstruct the actions of a potential perpetrator (e.g., approach the friends of someone who appears too drunk to consent).
Education and awareness for bystanders
Educational materials
Features for bystanders provide information on a variety of topics: defining sexual violence (e.g., domestic violence, grooming, cyberbullying, harassment, sexual misconduct, and human trafficking), identifying local resources, offering tips for recognizing warning signs that someone may be in danger, and providing advice about how to intervene. An app called A Call for Help stresses the importance of static information: ‘The simple act of downloading our FREE app and sharing it with your friends will lead to broader awareness, better understanding and eventually, change. Together, we can help women help themselves.’
Interactive education features
Interactive information features for bystanders most often appear in the form of games, mapping, and push notifications. Games typically invite users to play the bystander role in a story about an abusive relationship. For example, Grace’s Diary asks players to seek out memories and information that will help them have a conversation with a friend who may be in an unhealthy relationship. Mapping features facilitate location-based information collection for bystanders. For example, Hollaback invites users to report stories (with photos if available) of street harassment. In this case, the report is not directed toward authorities; instead, the broader aim is to ‘inspire the world to take action to end street harassment’ by making these reports visible on interactive maps. Apps for bystanders also use push notifications to provide information. The Green Dot App sends users daily suggestions about how bystanders can react to violence and help change attitudes about violence. Alternatively, Love Is Not Abuse simulates abusive relationships: ‘For just a few minutes, application users will receive text messages, emails and phone calls from a “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” that mimic the actual communications abused teens receive – in many cases, all day and night.’
Raising awareness
Social networks help users track and share crime statistics, share prevention messages, talk about the broader context of sexual violence, and support bystanders. Like the awareness features for victims, bystanders are also encouraged to share information about crime and suspects by recording details, GPS, and taking photos and video. For example, Safe Community includes a social network, neighborhood audit, and push notifications. The app allows users to develop both public and private networks to ‘follow a community and stay informed of everything that happens in it regarding safety,’ as well as reviewing and commenting on reported ‘security events.’ Alternatively, NetProtect uses a social network to encourage ‘women to join forces and become each other’s protectors against sexual violence,’ while R.I.S.E. connects users to a Facebook page to discuss sexual violence and offers material, ‘to be edited and shared within external social media networks’ including messages such as ‘consent is sexy.’
Features for perpetrators
Very few features (less than 1% of our sample, n = 6) are designed for perpetrators. One type guides users through the process of negotiating consent during a sexual encounter. The aim is both to protect potential perpetrators from ‘false claims’ of rape and to facilitate genuine consent, thus potentially preventing rape. For example, the app Consenting Adults ‘provides a consensual agreement between interested parties prior to engaging in sexual activities. The intent is to provide for protection against false claims of sexual assault or “day after regret.”’ Alternatively, the Good2Go app is launched by an ‘instigating’ partner and then handed over to another partner who answers a quiz to determine if they are ‘Good2Go,’ or not, or would like to talk first. If they are ‘Good2Go,’ the app asks more questions to determine their level of intoxication and age. A few other features offer information about anger management and facilitate hypnosis. The app Choose to Stop ‘gives practical support to those worried about their own abusive behaviour and shows how to recognise the signs of abuse.’
Discussion
We argue that the dominance of incident intervention prevention strategies (74% of all features) and victim-centric approaches (87% of all features) demonstrates that the design choices in this set of apps generally reinforce rather than challenge prevalent rape myths. In particular, we find that anti-rape apps reinforce two myths: (1) sexual violence is perpetrated primarily by strangers and (2) potential victims are responsible for preventing sexual violence through personal vigilance and risk reduction. Given that acceptance of rape myths and adherence to traditional gender roles are correlated with the perpetration of sexual violence (Tharp et al., 2013), we argue that the design of many of these apps may be inadvertently contributing to the problem of sexual violence rather than alleviating it.
We were also struck by the individual risk and incident prevention focus in anti-rape apps because the trends in app and web design in the last decade or so have been to leverage and expand social networks to increase motivation (in fitness apps), to promote competition and engagement (in games), and to communicate in various ways with friends (in texting and photo-sharing apps). Yet, such socially networked strategies to achieve a goal or increase engagement were rare in the anti-rape apps. The most common features that involve friends view them primarily as emergency responders. As such, we suspect that rape myths, rather than technological or other factors, account for more of the limitations we observed in this set of apps.
The stranger-danger myth
Since many people believe the common rape myth that most sexual assault perpetrators are strangers (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994), we determined whether each app is intended for cases with known perpetrators and/or strangers by analyzing the app descriptions. We found that the majority of apps (37%) claimed they were designed to prevent or intervene in situations with known perpetrators (acquaintances, friends, partners, family, coworkers, etc.), and another 33% suggested they were designed for both known perpetrators and strangers. The remaining 30% of apps targeted violence from strangers, with features such as monitoring potential victims’ movement in public spaces, sex offender tracking, and crime statistics.
Despite this finding that 70% of the apps say they are designed to be used against either known perpetrators or against both known perpetrators and strangers, the rape prevention features these apps offer still primarily work only in cases of attacks by strangers. The two most prevalent features in our set, allowing the victim to contact others for help (35% of all features) and enabling others to monitor the victim for signs of danger (26% of all features), are both unlikely to be effective against attacks by known perpetrators. Such features do not address the forms of coercion that known perpetrators typically use, including emotional manipulation, abusing a power relationship, or targeting intoxicated victims (Parkhill & Abbey, 2008). For example, if a person senses potential danger from a prominent school athlete, a supervisor at work, or a trusted romantic partner, the typical deterrents to reporting may render an incident intervention app useless in these scenarios. However, further research is needed to determine if particular mobile app features could help victims overcome the barriers to resisting and reporting known perpetrators.
This set of apps also reflects a stranger-danger bias in its location-monitoring features (13% of all features), which typically only work to alert others when victims are in unexpected locations. In other words, people who are victimized in familiar locations, such as their homes or workplaces, would likely not be helped by an app monitoring their location. Apps that use geofences to designate places such as ‘home’ and ‘work’ as safe likewise reflect the common myth that people are more at risk from unknown people and in unknown places.
Victim-blaming and incident intervention
The literature on sexual violence in the past few decades has clearly shown that addressing anti-rape interventions to potential victims does not stop rape, but instead, as Hall explains, ‘creates a culture of fear in which women are encouraged to resign themselves to the inevitability of sexual violence’ (Hall, 2004, p. 11). Moreover, risk reduction messages for potential victims operate as a form of social control (curtailing mobility, clothing, etc.) (Riger & Gordon, 1981), and while they may lead a rapist to choose a different victim, they are ineffective in reducing the overall rates of sexual violence. Such messages for victims to reduce their potential risk are particularly troubling because they often contribute to victim blaming, which is a common justification perpetrators use to minimize the harm of their actions, for example, by claiming the victim was ‘asking for it’ by flirting, drinking, being out late, etc. (Scully & Marolla, 1984). This set of apps reflects the dominant messages about rape prevention that potential victims are responsible for mitigating their risk, since the majority of features are incident intervention for victims (70% of all features) and victim-centered education and awareness resources (17% of all features). These results suggest that app designers collectively view individual actions, particularly by a potential victim during an incident, as the best ‒ or as the only practical ‒ technological solution to rape an app can offer. The result is that a large majority of features in rape prevention apps reflect and reinforce the rape myth that potential victims (as opposed to bystanders or perpetrators) are the most capable of reducing the incidence of sexual violence.
When our set of apps enrolls bystanders in sexual violence prevention, the focus is on emergencies. While such features may be effective for individuals using the app in particular situations, apps using an incident intervention approach do not typically contribute to social change and might in fact reinforce rape myths. As Elk and Devereaux (2014) note, such a focus on heroics and emergency incident response reproduces the problematic myth that sexual violence is limited to extraordinary incidents. They also point out: ‘Treating sexual assault as primarily a question of isolated incidents and one-off acts of heroism is, in the end, just another way to ignore how violence is normalized and minimized in our everyday interactions’ (Elk & Devereaux, 2014). Indeed, victims and perpetrators alike do not view some incidents of forced or nonconsensual sexual acts as rape in certain contexts (Edwards, Bradshaw, & Hinsz, 2014; Harris, 2011). Thus, incident intervention features cannot address the fundamental social problem that some acts of sexual violence are not even recognized as unacceptable. Moreover, the option to intervene is not equally available to everyone, since people of color are disproportionately criminalized for defending themselves and others against potential violence (Coker, 2013).
Design constraints and possibilities
The affordances of anti-rape app features emerge out of a complex interaction between developers, institutions, and their assumptions about sexual violence as well as financial constraints, hardware of technological devices, operating systems, app store policies, and the nature of the app market. After we discuss these technological and financial constraints, we turn to a discussion of the kinds of apps and features that would be possible if developers followed the violence prevention literature but still worked within these same limitations.
Even organizations with a deep understanding of the research on effective sexual violence prevention must negotiate with the limited capabilities of mobile phones and app designers. In the case of R.I.S.E., the nonprofit organization that developed the app consulted with community stakeholders and were attentive to the violence prevention literature. However, due to budget constraints, they used a preformatted template, which limited the features of the app to providing users with static information. In some cases, organizations are responding to a call from a granting agency. For example, the Apps Against Abuse judging criteria state that the app ‘should allow users to designate “trusted friends/allies/emergency contacts” and provide a means for checking-in directly with these individual [sic] in real-time’ (‘Apps,’ 2011). Moreover, given that men are more likely to support rape myths (Suarez & Gadalla, 2010), and that 76% of computer scientists are male (National Science Board, 2016), the demographic makeup of app developers may have also had an overall impact on design choices.
Possible apps
While our set of apps generally reflects and promotes prevalent rape myths, many researchers identify new digitally mediated forms of resistance to social problems and injustices. Rentschler (2014) argues that new media networks, including apps, tumblrs, tweets, and websites, can facilitate collective forms of resistance to rape culture by coordinating and collecting testimonies of personal experiences. For example, she argues that a mobile phone with the Hollaback! app ‘becomes a networked video production and documentation tool against street harassment ‒ an activist witnessing technology’ (Rentschler, 2014, p. 72). Callisto (Sexual Health Innovations, 2016) addresses some of the barriers to reporting by allowing users to make anonymous reports via an online system and the option to choose to pursue their case only if another person reports the same assailant. In other contexts, apps have been developed to track incidents of police brutality (McCrae, 2014) and record voter suppression (Moncelle, 2014). An app called Ugly Mugs helps sex workers manage bad clients by searching a database and immediately notifying the user if the caller has been flagged by other users (Powell, 2015). Given the networked social tools that apps can provide, we are hopeful that evidence-based anti-rape apps might have the potential to genuinely help reduce sexual violence. Since we did not find many promising examples in our set of existing apps, the remainder of this discussion imagines some alternative apps that address the problems with rape myths that we found in our current set using the same features they offer but for different ends.
Apps for victims
Many apps are designed for a general market, and developers likely assume that people who see themselves as potential victims are most likely to be motivated to download and use an app that appears to solve their problem. While the literature on rape prevention demonstrates that programs aimed at potential victims are generally ineffective, one that is supported by evidence is a program for training women with verbal and physical self-defense skills that focuses on resisting known perpetrators (Senn et al., 2015). Yet, the potentially negative effects of such programs, such as increasing victim self-blame and guilt, need further study (Basile, 2015). In any case, this particular approach to prevention is absent in our set, and the most common self-defense actions involved hiding the app from perpetrators or sounding a loud alarm. An educational app for potential victims could use static and interactive information features, including games and quizzes, to instruct users in these self-defense skills by offering training to overcome the social and emotional barriers to resisting unwanted sexual advances from known perpetrators (Senn et al., 2015).
Apps for perpetrators
Based on the literature, it is clear that an effective anti-rape app would need to be part of a broader rape prevention program. The violence prevention programs that show the most promise are typically multimodal; start in the teenager years or earlier; include individuals as well as parents, peers, and educators; and work to change the social attitudes that tolerate or encourage sexual violence (DeGue et al., 2014). For example, two programs that had positive results in a controlled evaluation design provided multiple lessons over time and provided opportunities for students to critique gender stereotypes and learn relationship and conflict skills (DeGue et al., 2014). Another promising program for male high school athletes uses coaches as role models to alter the norms that facilitate intimate partner violence (Miller et al., 2012). In general, programs that target potential perpetrators need to dismantle gender stereotypes and rape myths, while increasing empathy for victims (Diehl, Glaser, & Bohner, 2014) and setting norms for communication and conflict in intimate relationships. Only one app in our set provided conflict training. Though potential perpetrators would likely not seek out an app on their own, the use of such an educational app could be required in schools or workplaces (alongside existing sexual harassment and ethics trainings) and as part of a comprehensive evidence-based sexual violence prevention program. Such an app could reflect the literature by requiring a series of tasks to be completed over time and facilitating engagement with peers, authority figures, and community members. We also wonder if apps that target perpetrators could include features designed to increase empathy for victims or dismantle rape myths by integrating them into a game. While our methodology of using keywords may not have uncovered stealth anti-rape apps designed for potential rapists, we did not come across any such designs in our review of the media coverage of anti-rape apps.
Apps for bystanders
Since potential perpetrators are unlikely to engage in an anti-rape program without social or institutional coercion, and intervention efforts aimed at victims are largely ineffective, bystanders are an increasingly popular point of intervention (Banyard, Moynihan, & Plante, 2007; McMahon, Postmus, & Koenick, 2011). Many sexual violence prevention researchers are investigating training for bystanders to help resist rape myths and gender stereotypes, intervene in incidents, and support victims (Storer, Casey, & Herrenkohl, 2015). Given the importance of changing social norms about sexual violence, an education and awareness app for bystanders could help users dismantle rape myths by educating them with static information, games, and quizzes, and offering links to social networks to help educate others.
Community accountability strategies, which aim to end sexual violence by transforming cultures and institutions (Douglas, Bathrick, & Perry, 2008; Durazo, 2011; Kim, 2011; Smith, 2011), are another set of approaches that engage bystanders, perpetrators, and victims. Community accountability involves enabling communities (such as a church, workplace, or apartment complex) to ‘develop sustainable strategies to address community members’ abusive behavior,’ while providing safety and support to the survivors, respecting their self-determination, and also working to end complicity for abuse and oppression in the community itself and in broader political structures (INCITE!, 2014). The power of this approach is that instead of merely responding to incidents after they have occurred, imploring bystanders to intervene in incidents, or asking victims to reduce their individual risk, community accountability aims to undercut the institutions, attitudes, and social norms that allow and enable sexual violence. Given the social networking functionality of apps, we wonder if and how an app might help support community accountability initiatives, such as app features that offer training in this method, a community-specific reporting system, and online discussions.
Conclusion
Our analysis shows that the features in anti-rape apps overwhelmingly rely on, and in turn promote, problematic rape myths. We may eventually, as U.S. CTO Chopra claimed, invent our way to a world with less sexual violence, but we are skeptical of apps that offer victims individual incident intervention tools that are useful primarily against perpetrators who are strangers. Like the typical advice for women counseling risk-reduction tactics (e.g., don’t walk alone, don’t drink), this approach puts all the responsibility for risk avoidance on potential victims. As Bardzell (2010) warns, software design can ‘make us become the kind of user the software is for, bracketing aside the rest of ourselves that is not relevant to the software. The software gives us an identity that we are pressured into accepting’ (p. 1307). As such, we are concerned that the current field of anti-rape apps that focuses on victims’ responsibilities and promotes stranger-danger may actually exacerbate the problem of sexual violence. Giving potential victims new tools to prevent specific incidents may be valuable to them, but the notion that this is a meaningful way to end rape implies that rape, as a broad social problem, actually cannot be prevented, and can only be avoided by vigilant and responsible individuals. Like a weather app that merely warns of oncoming disaster, apps that treat sexual violence like an inevitable force of nature cannot actually help end rape as a social problem.
Given the wide range of possible features available in apps and the renewed conversation about sexual violence, particularly on college campuses, we were disappointed that rape prevention apps largely reproduce common rape myths. However, we are optimistic that anti-rape apps might, when designed with careful attention to the literature on sexual violence prevention, be uniquely positioned to help intervene in the structures, systems, and social norms that lead to the high incidence of sexual violence in our culture.