A ‘design justice’ approach to developing digital tools for addressing gender-based violence : Exploring the possibilities and limits of feminist chatbots

Digital tools, such as safety apps, reporting portals, and chatbots, are increasingly being used by victim-survivors of gender-based violence to report unlawful activity and access specialized support and information. Despite their limitations, these interventions offer a range of potential benefits, such as enhancing decisional certainty, promoting safety behaviors, and fostering positive psychological outcomes. In this paper, we introduce an innovative ‘design justice’ approach to the development of digital tools for addressing gender-based violence. Drawing on our experience of building a feminist chatbot focused on image-based sexual abuse, we argue that the integration of feminist principles throughout the design, content, and evaluation stages is crucial for mitigating the risk of harm and promoting positive outcomes. Our theory-informed and practice-led approach can help to guide the development of other digital tools for addressing gender-based violence. Nonetheless, more scholarly research is needed to investigate the use, efficacy, and impacts of such interventions, at the core of which should be interdisciplinary collaboration between subject matter experts, victim-survivors, technical specialists, and other key stakeholders.

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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