Allegation escrow platforms: Target rape, reporter's dilemma, and the promise of "he said, they said"

Abstract

Callisto, created by Sexual Health Innovations in 2015, is a sexual assault reporting application based on an information escrow model. By employing a walkthrough method of the platform’s primary tools (recording and matching), this essay situates Callisto’s design within proliferating informal rape justice responses that try to overcome the law’s disappointing rehearsal of “he said/she said” logic. This critical user-centered approach to interpreting the values enacted through the technology suggests that Callisto is the reflection of the evolving social dynamics of “target rape” and internal dynamics of victimization (“reporters’ dilemma”) on college and university campuses. As Callisto generates forms of evidence of sexual assault through its platform, collective forms of responsibility are fostered among victims to report, demonstrating the influence of digital platforms as novel forms of popular evidence unburdened by law’s preoccupation with the immediacy of visual proof.

Discernment: Blurring and visual evidence

“…Doing so would improve the overall visual literacy level of the general population from which jurors are drawn. Moore's (2023) research on allegation escrows, further discussed below, provides an example of how expressive opportunities and contexts can both stimulate production of a greater store of images of possible evidential force and generate additional images through analysis of data across cases using techniques such as mapping. This example highlights the sociotechnical problem of the need to align technological innovations with institutional innovations -in this case, in changes or additions to rules of evidence for taking allegation escrows into explicit account.…”

“…The good news is that these authors also introduce research findings showing that courtroom instructions can make a difference in the extent to which such biases are problematic in a given case. Moore (2023) analyzes a technique for making evidence contextual in their analysis of an app that escrows allegations, in this case of sexual assault at a university: the information is not revealed until at least one other allegation matches key characteristics. This approach produces new visual evidence in a map of where assaults are taking place on campus that can be useful for identifying perpetrators.…”