Using Mobile Technology to Enhance College Sexual Violence Response, Prevention, and Risk Reduction Efforts

Abstract

Given high rates of sexual violence (SV) perpetrated against college students, campus administrators need to identify and utilize strategies to prevent and reduce the risk of SV before, during, and after violence has occurred. Developments in technology offer easily accessible avenues for colleges to deliver accurate resources to students in real time. The present study describes the iterative development process that engaged campus administrators, rape crisis center advocates, law enforcement, and students in the development of the mobile application (app), uSafeUS®. Unlike other college safety apps, uSafeUS provides primary prevention by facilitating users safe exit from potentially dangerous situations, secondary prevention by enabling the user to secure help when SV occurs, and tertiary prevention that enables users to obtain resources to help themselves or a friend in the aftermath of SV, all in one place.

Keywords:

• Campus safety
• mobile technology
• sexual violence prevention

Notes

1 In the paper, we describe students attending 4-year colleges and universities, as well as 2-year colleges and community colleges. For brevity, we use word “college” to refer to these institutions.

2 We differentiate between the terms “survivor” and “victim.” The term “survivor” is used to refer to someone who was sexually victimized and is facing the short- and long-term effects of the trauma. The term “victim” is used to refer to someone in the immediate aftermath of the crime or when referring to certain aspects of the criminal justice system (Potter et al., 2018; RAINN 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NH Charitable Foundation.