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A genius 'Tinder-like' platform could help stop sexual assaults on college campuses

Sexual assault on college campuses isn't uncommon; many women just never report what happened to them because of shame or a fear of retaliation, among other things.

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An online platform now rolling out to universities could change that. Instead of having to sit down with a school staffer and going over what happened, students can create a time-stamped online record of their account — and perhaps most importantly, they can submit a report that isn't sent until they are "matched" with another victim reporting the same assailant. 

College Graduates
Flickr / CAFNR

One out of five women in the U.S. reports having been sexually assaulted. When Jessica Ladd was a college student, she joined their ranks. Ladd dutifully went through the reporting process, but ultimately felt that it was needlessly intimidating and retraumatizing. She came out of the experience wishing she had never reported at all.

As she continued on through school at Pomona College, she started realizing a number of her friends were also survivors, and never reported for a variety of reasons. "I starting thinking about how to change the system to create more agency and control," she tells Tech Insider.

Ladd, a TED Fellow and infectious disease epidemiologist by training, started a nonprofit called Sexual Health Innovations in 2012. By 2015, she had enough funding to ramp up the rollout of Callisto, an online platform that makes it easy for college students to report sexual assault.

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To use the platform, students write what happened to them through a series of multiple choice and free response questions to create a time-stamped report. Once the report is saved, they can choose when (or if) to actually send it to their school.

The real genius of Callisto is in its matching system. Instead of immediately sending a sexual assault report, a student can opt instead to put their report in escrow — that is, waiting until another survivor reports an assault from the same person (using their Facebook URL as an identifier). The survivors are notified by email when there is a match; if both students decide to report, the assailant identity is sent to the school at the same time. 

The system ensures that survivors don't have to feel alone, and that schools are alerted to repeat offenders.

"For the first time, we’ll have good data about repeat offenders. Right now studies ask men if they've ever assaulted someone, and if so how many people and how many times  — then estimating out of that," says Ladd.  

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As the Washington Post points out, Callisto's escrow system works somewhat similarly to Tinder. "Like the Tinder escrow, Callisto allows people to discover an undisclosed shared interest — except Callisto accomplishes this without one person knowing the identity of the other, or even whether the other individual exists," writes Ian Ayres.

So far, Pomona College and University of San Francisco have signed on to use Callisto.

At Pomona, the platform has been working well since its launch in the fall of 2015, according to Daren Mooko, the Associate Dean and Title IX Coordinator at the school. Nonetheless, it has been a slow start, and Mooko declined to provide numbers on how many students use Callisto versus reporting assault in person.

"We don’t know how we can answer the question because it is a baseline year, so we’re not sure what numbers mean," he says. But since so few women report their assaults, he's glad to have another option beyond reporting in person, regardless of the platform's initial popularity.

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Thus far, there hasn't been any noticeable backlash from students concerned about false accusations — but the service is still new.

"I really do believe that students find value in having Callisto as an option," he says.

Ladd hopes to add three to five more schools in the coming months, and she's in talks with the U.S. military about rolling out Callisto there.

The military's sexual assault problem is so atrocious that the UN recently got involved. Callisto can't possibly solve such a huge problem, but it certainly can't hurt.

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