A lawyer by profession, Kirthi Jayakumar had a life-altering experience in 2016 that put her on the path to fighting gender-based violence in her native India.
On that fateful day in May, a dear friend who had been a victim of extreme domestic violence while residing in the UK was frantically trying to reach Jayakumar after escaping from her abuser. The following morning, Jayakumar woke to 16 messages and 31 calls from the friend.
While a good Samaritan eventually helped her friend, the incident shook Jayakumar. From her own inability to help, she wondered how traumatic it would be for victims of violence to have no one to reach out to or nowhere to report the matter.
It was these unanswered questions and a genuine sense of responsibility that led her to start Saahas, which means courage in Hindi, an app and chatbot that consists of a directory of over 40,000 organisations across 196 countries offering everything from medical, legal and consular advice to refugee-specific support for victims of gender-based violence.
Jayakumar was one of five chatbot founders to be invited by the Thailand Institute of Justice for a roundtable online discussion recently on the challenges and sustainability of chatbots against gender-based violence (GBV).
Joining Saahas were Rainbow (South Africa), Hello Cass (Australia), Ame (Botswana) and MySis (Thailand).
While GBV chatbots have played an integral part in addressing gender-based violence in communities across the globe, keeping them sustainable under the Covid-19 pandemic has been anything but easy for the teams.
The panellists agreed that while each of their chatbots had made an impact, there was still a lot of work to be accomplished in combatting gender-based violence; with one in three women experiencing violence of some sort in their lifetime. Thirty-eight percent of femicides have been reported to be committed by an intimate partner.
"Covid-19 lockdowns have also raised instances of mistreatment of women. In the first week of the national lockdown alone in South Africa, police recorded over 2,300 GBV cases," remarked Alice Petrova of the Rainbow chatbot.
"Last June, labour unions reported that the number of GBV cases had risen by 500% since the lockdown, while over 70% of frontline services were made to reduce [due to the economic impact from the pandemic]."
Leloba Lijane said chatbot Ame's sustainability goals were to continue to bridge the gap between survivors seeking assistance and service providers.
Lijane said they aspired to offer services to people in rural areas, in addition to ensuring that services are available 24/7 and shortening the time for responders to reach victims. To make this happen, she said it is pivotal to facilitate collaboration between service providers.
The victim's privacy and how chatbots are addressing it became a hot topic of discussion with Petrova sharing the need to especially pay attention to how one designs the product to look on the screen.
"We put a lot of thought into the design of the actual logo, colours and the name because you have to make it as vague as possible, the last thing we want is to bring any unnecessary suspicion from the perpetrators," said Petrova.
"So we made our chatbot logo unisex, ambiguous and super childish, to blend in with the rest of the apps one would find on a phone. For our platform, we decided to go privacy by design, which is an approach to systems engineering that seeks to ensure protection for the privacy of individuals by integrating considerations of privacy issues from the very beginning of the development of products, services, business practices and physical infrastructures.
"If the worst-case scenario is for data to escape, the data that is collected does not reveal the identity of the actual person."
Jayakumar said from experience when it came privacy issues, what mattered was how at ease the victim felt with using the apps.
In her opinion, questions that should be asked include what medium looks comfortable for them at the moment they need support? What does their device allow them in terms of the data offered? What time can they access this? And so on and so forth.
"I think it is about positionality, how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society, rather than an absolute understanding of privacy and that is one of the reasons why choosing multiple mediums becomes useful," Jayakumar said.
"My current spread is on Telegram, website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Twitter. The idea is for the person to decide what is most comfortable and safe for them. That is my approach to privacy. I don't collect any data to understand who has accessed the app. There is no active attempt on my part to collect any data.
"That said it is an imperfect way to approach it. I wouldn't say a chatbot is a 100% solution."
Jayakumar credits the insight she has managed to receive through the years to better understand the dynamics of her work.
"Deep listening has come in handy," she stated. "In India, a very interesting phenomenon is that within the low-income groups you have households that have a very marked characteristic when it comes to the ownership of a mobile phone.
"The men have smartphones, which means they can access a wide range of apps, social media platforms and speedy internet. For women, they have functional phones for calls to come in, sometimes outgoing calls are disabled. Some don't get the prepaid balance to make phone calls while others are only allowed to receive text messages on their numbers. With such a dichotomy, how do you reach the last mile? The vision thus looked very bleak for me because it wasn't reaching who I wanted to reach. What I learned through deep listening was that these women build their own trusted corners."
For instance, she said, an Indian woman working as a domestic help in a residential area trusts the people she works with.
This would mean reaching out to the woman's employer and requesting them to hand over information on gender-based violence to the domestic help when the need arises. It is about developing a trustworthy connection that could become a liaison between your service and the person in need of the benefits the service can offer.
Having said this, she admits it is easier said than done: "It is always about playing it by ear. It is always about being mindful. It is also about checking your privilege and positionality.
"I am not a techie, I am a lawyer. Sometimes we approach things with a sense of, 'I think this is good for the person I am helping', and then we just rush headlong with that as a solution. I think that entire learning process, stopping right there and having a conversation in our head and then creating a solution, that has been my learning curve these past seven years working on the bot and app."
Closing the discussion on an emphatic note Jayakumar said: "As someone who has survived 15 years of sexual abuse at the hands of so many people, I know what pain is. I know what it means to stand up and not receive support, information, or know where to go.
"Thus as long as I am able to do something about it [GBV], I will continue and the day I can't I will hang up my robes and say to you [chatbot founders], take this and do what you will with it because I can trust you will make it go forward. At the end of the day even if it [Saahas] helps one survivor it has made a difference."
