SAFE (Safety Awareness for Empowerment)

How can we make our city a safer place for women? SAFE provides solutions to improve student and citizen well-being through the prevention, defense, monitoring and access to resources on sexual harassment and assault. Our approach will equip the university and city on three facets of sexual harassment and assault:

1.   Prevention: Novel boundaries and consent workshops

2.   Defense: Peer evidence-based self-defense course 

3.   Assistance and Research: Intelligent Chatbot for local survivor resource assistance; target incidences to help policy makers efficiently allocate resources to most vulnerable areas. 

This holistic approach functions as a platform that initiates dialogue and activities around gender and inclusion for all. Each facet serves to reinforce one another so as to equip citizens with the knowledge, tools and resources to protect themselves in a variety of situations where they feel their safety has been violated.

Young women, student and non-student alike, are more likely to be assaulted by someone known to them. In fact,  70% of sexual assault is perpetrated by people known to the survivor. Resources for sexual assault and harassment prevention and defense often don’t address the nuances of this fact.

When sexual assault or harassment does occur, shame, fear, self-blame, and lack of trust in organizations, are some of the factors that inhibit survivors from reporting sexual assault or harassment. Even in cases where survivors would like to report, students often do not know who to contact or the resources that are available to them.

Currently, we are serving the urban young adult female population (18-35) in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The city's main industry is education. We directly work with the two largest universities in the city, Maastricht University and Hogeschool Zuid. Maastricht University is taught only in English and 51% of the students are foreigners.

We collaborate with the city government and the Centrum Seksueel Geweld, which is the sexual assault center funded by the Dutch government which has a regional office in Maastricht. Our consent workshops were co-developed by by students from Maastricht University and a licensed local therapist from another local university in Maastricht. Further, we are running focus groups to ensure our chatbot application user friendly and sensitive to the needs of young women in Maastricht.

The city and university are decentralized and access to information can be difficult or time consuming to attain, especially in an international context in which students may be unaware of the laws and resources available to them. Our tool is designed for a European city with a large international population, such as Maastricht. Our aim is to expand to other cities who have decentralized systems.

Prevention: Boundaries and Consent Workshop

To feel safe and comfortable, we must recognize and respect each other’s boundaries. This is why we have developed a novel and innovative new workshop - led and designed by a drama-therapist which includes role-playing, games, and other interactive elements that ultimately aims to create a more inclusive environment. The workshop provides tools for people to overcome cultural differences and learn to understand other people’s and our own boundaries, whether in everyday settings as well as in sexual encounters. It does not focus on a victim/perpetrator dynamic but rather on developing communication skills and respect for boundaries of all individuals. The workshop is open to people of all genders.

The workshop lasts about 2 hours and can be held with a group of up to 25 people.  

Defense: EAAA Peer Self-Defense Courses

EAAA is the only evidence-based self-defense course in the world that has studies to support it reduces sexual assault rates. Delivered by female-identifying peers, EAAA empowers students by teaching: 

1. realistic risk factors associated with sexual assault, such as the prevalence of assault through acquaintances rather than strangers
2. how to overcome emotional barriers to self-defense, and 
3. effective physical and verbal defense strategies. 

This combination of education and practice is imperative for a self-defense program’s effectiveness. Two EAAA certified coaches will teach four student facilitators to lead the self-defense program. They will teach groups of max. 20 young female-identifying students. The course is taught in four 3-hour evening sessions or during one weekend.  

Assistance: Intelligent AI Chatbot for Survivor Resource Assistance

We harness the power of technology (machine learning and AI chatbots) to impact women’s safety and provide empirical evidence about sexual assault. 

We built the first intelligent chatbot to assist survivors of sexual assault and violence. Our tool goes beyond just being a stagnant page of contacts, the bot interacts with the user to help identify the appropriate resources depending on the location and type of assault. The tool provides women a safe and anonymous environment to share their experience and get help from appropriate resources.

We do this by leveraging machine learning techniques to better identify and target locations across Maastricht where young women are more vulnerable and, identify language patterns that describe sexual harassment or assault to better direct appropriate resources for survivors.

Our approach to reducing sexual assault and harassment is a community driven designed for decentralized cities. Each part of our program serves to go beyond awareness, but provide women with the tools they need from prevention to assistance.

Our program is innovative in a few ways:

• Our AI chatbot is the first interactive response tools that provide fast and relevant resources, including direct contact information to immediately assist survivors alongside a data gathering mechanism to aid local policy makers. Navigating institutions and resources can be particularly difficult for an international community who may be unaware of the laws and resources that are available from either the police or university.

• Integrated within our AI chatbot, we provide continuous monitoring of the municipality with clear data of problem areas or hotspots by type of experience.

• Integration of activities, resources, tools and monitoring into one cohesive campaign. We build off our predecessors and include evidence-based workshops that have been shown to reduce sexual assault rates by including realistic education of threats and exploring emotional barriers necessary to overcoming defense, as well as physical defense strategies suitable for women. 
• Newly developed workshop on tools for communicating and respecting boundaries. The workshop is adaptable to different groups of people depending on their own interests and experiences, thus ensuring it feels relevant and appropriate for all participants to create an atmosphere in which boundaries and consent are more easily discussed, and the topic of sexual assault is lifted out of its taboo.

The core technology is the chatbot which is developed from artificial intelligence and machine learning.  This requires applying a variety of existing tools and combine them to serve survivors of sexual assault and harassment. 

Text Classification (BERT):

We use text classification with an initial training dataset to group responses into categories of sexual assault and harassment types. As people use the chatbot, the categorization will improve based on the community that we serve as we include mechanism for validation within the chatbot. 

Named Entity Recognition:

We also use named entity recognition to identify any additional characteristics about the experience - times, specific streets, neighborhoods, etc.  While we also have a map embedded within our chatbot, we also want to fine tune the time or even particular restaurants or bars to capture the most granular information on location data.

Chatbot Architecture:

We built a chatbot that can interact with the user which integrates machine learning techniques to better serve the user's need. We are currently testing our prototype to sort out bugs and user design with focus groups and plan to release our demo by August.

In order to reduce sexual assault and harassment broad change must occur in two ways, person-to-person interaction that is further complemented by a broad campaign.  Research has shown that when it comes to reducing sexual harassment and assault, the two approaches reinforce one another to institute broader change. 

Our two workshops provide in-person interaction. We hope to reach a broad audience of all genders in our consent workshops and working with the university, our first step is having this workshop as part of the incoming class required training. In the first year, this will be optional, but in the future the university would like this be integrated within their incoming class activities. Our second workshop on self-defense is student-led, which encourages leadership. The program also has a strong foundation in growing these courses based on student interest and has found success is doing this in other cities.

Our AI chatbot serves as a resource, but also a broader reminder of sexual assault and harrassment issues. We are promoting the tool with all of our various partners to ensure we have broad outreach to expand its usage to those who need it. The more that people are reminded of these issues and talk about their experiences, the more we can reduce its occurrence as bystanders will have courage to speak against it, and survivors are more likely to get help when they need it.

Our launch date is August 2018. For the year ahead we have planned to have:

200 students who have taken the consent matter workshop

60 students who have taken the self defense course

500 young people who have used the chatbot

In 5 years we would like to expand this program to at least 5-8 cities across Europe.

We want our tool to impact as many cities as possible, that's why we plan to provide our open source code to anyone who wants it, and release anonymized data to serve as training data. 

However, we also plan to create collaborations and partnerships with nearby Dutch cities after our proof of concept is established. We plan to offer our services and build out our program within a city for a fee.

Currently, our chatbot is only available in English, even though the three most spoken language in Maastricht is English, Dutch and German. We know that people are most comfortable to discuss their experiences in their native langauge, and that's why we think it's important to create training datasets on this topic in other languages. In the next few years, we'd like to build training datasets with Dutch and German to start, and within five years, Spanish. 

Another constraints is that our team lacks a professional front-end developer who can expertly design our interface to ensure the interaction is seamless and easy for our users.

We are currently working with local Dutch organizations who we are

discussing about the possibility to provide us with anonymous
testimonies so that we can build a Dutch training data set.We need to
connect to other organizations, German or Spanish speaking, so that we
can develop these training datasets and offer our chatbot in more cities
across Europe and the world. More partnerships will help us overcome this issue.

In the second case, we'd like the financial resources to hire a part-time front end develop to design our chatbot.

We are a team of researchers, professors, practitioners and students across Maastricht University.

We have 2 self defense teachers, 1 trained workshop leader, 1 professor alongside 3 students to develop the AI chatbot, and 2 part-time staff who manage the project. As we get more funding, we plan to hire more staff.

Our team is composed of researchers, professors and a student community activist. Each member contributes to this project through different specializations that make up a well rounded team to reduce sexual assault and harassment.

Jerry Spanakis is an assistant professor in Data Science & Knowledge Engineering at the Faculty of Science and Engineering and specializes in machine learning, specifically natural language processing. He’s a core member developing the AI chatbot.

Julieta Marota is the director of the Masters of Public Policy program at UNU-MERIT within Maastricht University. She has direct experience working with survivors of sexual violence and understands the nuances of how to ask questions regarding their experience, as well as, understanding their legal rights.

Alice Wellum has 5 years experience teaching physical self-defense courses with prior experience setting up student- peer initiatives. She is a professor at Maastricht University deeply committed to the longevity of the program.

Mary Kaltenberg is a postdoctoral research at Brandeis University and a former PhD student at Maastricht University. She specializes in managing and bringing together talent to tackle sexual harassment and assault, as well as, developing tools to help better quantify sexual harassment and assault prevalence.

Eva de Haan, along with various other students, founded Consent Matters Maastricht, an organization working on issues of consent and sexual assault at UM and the wider Maastricht community. She has experience on student led community activism directly related to consent, sexual assault and harassment from a student perspective.

• Maastricht University: We work closely with the student support services, particularly counselors who support students and staff who experienced sexual assault. The university will also help promote the tool's use. We also won a Diversity & Inclusion grant of 11,000 Euros from the university.
• SWOL Limburg Fund: Provided a grant of 2,000 Euros in support of our initiative
• CSG (Centrum Seksueel Geweld, Center for Sexual Assault): We work directly with staff members of CSG who advise us on existing resources, develop the language we use to ask questions in our tool, and help promote the tool's use.
• Hogeschool Zuid: Similar, to Maastricht University, we work with counselars who support students who experience sexual assault and harassment, and they also promote the tool's use
• The City of Maastricht (Gemeente): The city is in support of our tool to promote the tool's use. We are also in contact with the Police department who may adopt and promote the tool after our trial test period.