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College Campus Reporting Options for Sexual Violence
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Location: United States
Callisto is a technology-based non-profit organization specifically designed by survivors of sexual assault for survivors to report their experience and seek outside help from their university, in case they do not feel safe reporting their assault to campus authorities. They partner with college campus support groups and individual students to help victims of sexual assault report their experience in an informative and sensitive way that avoids individuals from experiencing victim-blaming. Callisto is a service open to everyone, including those who do not attend university; however, its history is rooted in partnerships with university students.
Organization: Callisto
About the Wise Practice
Founded in 2011 as Sexual Health Innovation (SHI), Jess Ladd created what is now known as Callisto in an effort to make reporting systems for sexual violence more accessible and easy to navigate. This non-profit offers an online service with three main features: matching, recording, and resource provision. The Matching System helps identify repeat offenders who are identified upon 2+ reports. Victims are then contacted by a personal Legal Options Counselor to discuss next steps. Individuals can record their experience via Callisto’s program. The resources Callisto provides include options to get in touch with psychological and legal counselling, how to prepare for interviews with police officers, and how to navigate reporting on campus if that is the decided course of action.
Callisto is a service that recognizes the importance of individual rights and choices when it comes to reporting incidents of assault. It recognizes that often, university campuses do not effectively support students who come forward as victims of sexual assault and provides them a free, safe, confidential, and alternative reporting method. The non-profit has a designated full-time staff member deemed the Assistant Director of Campus Engagement and hires and partners with software engineers to stay up-to-date on the latest and most secure reporting technologies. Its most unique feature is its matching program, as according to reports by Callisto, offenders can commit sexual assault up to 6 times prior to graduation from a university campus.
Category
Goals
Goal 1: Prevent and eliminate all forms of violence and harassment against women and girls in private and public spaces, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation (NUA 13c, 39; SDG 5.2; CEDAW article 6).
Monitoring
Callisto has a CEO and board of directors composed of professors at Yale Law School, directors of Planned Parenthood, and other notable institutions who meet annually to review the efficacy of its services. In order to determine whether their technology is effective, they review feedback from users of their service and adjust their programs accordingly.
Measurement
The founder, Jess Ladd, gave a TED talk in 2016 and since then, this platform has expanded to receive funding from large multinational corporations including Google. Callisto has been featured in both Forbes magazine and Late Night with Seth Rogen. In 2018, Callisto reported it had helped survivors from over 12 college campuses in the United States, including Pomona College, Claremont Mckenna University, and Stanford University. It is affiliated with colleges on both coasts of the United States, from California to Florida. Its goal by the end of 2021 is 40 campuses. Due to confidentiality reasons, Callisto does not publicly publish the number of reports it receives or any disaggregated data by age, ethnicity, or gender identity.
Lessons Learned
The most important values of Callisto include respect, privacy, and individual autonomy. Regardless of an individual's choices of action, Callisto has learned that it is there to support and advise, not direct and take over. Most notably, this service was created by victims of sexual assault to serve other victims; therefore, it is well-informed and sensitive to lived experience.
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