Loading...
A ‘design justice’ approach to developing digital tools for addressing gender-based violence : Exploring the possibilities and limits of feminist chatbots
Henry, Nicola Witt, Alice Vasil, Stefani
Henry, Nicola
Witt, Alice
Vasil, Stefani
Abstract
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.
Keywords
design justice, digital tools, gender-based violence, feminist chatbots, image-based sexual abuse
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Information, Communication and Society
Book
Volume
Issue
Page Range
1-24
Article Number
ACU Department
Thomas More Law School
Faculty of Law and Business
Faculty of Law and Business
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.