After a wave of sexual assaults broke out at Harvard, Michael Lissack, executive director at Boston area-based Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE), wanted to change how people think about consent.
The institute examines how change can be effected in organizations, and Lissack told NTRSCTN in a phone interview that its members "were looking at what Harvard was trying to do, and we were like, 'This is insane. You cannot demand social change by edict.'"
"How you make change happen is not by ordering it, but by looking at the context in which behavior happens and seeing if you can tweak the context," he said. So, Lissack and his fellow researchers asked themselves, "What is the most ubiquitous context for a college student? And the answer was their cell phone."
Through a four-app suite called We-Consent, the ISCE has brought consent to students' smartphones at several dozen schools throughout the U.S.
Two of the apps are meant to be used during encounters with potential sexual partners. We-Consent is an affirmative consent program to safely video, encrypt, and store recording of both parties' consent. Users record their partners saying "yes" to sexual encounters—or saying "forced yes" if they feel coerced so there's a record of the coercion. If the latter happens, Lissack said, the person recorded then gets to say, "You are an idiot. You just made a permanent record of the idea that you are coercing me. Can I go now?"
And if the answer is "no," that's where What-About-No comes in. This app lets you play a video of a "burly Boston policeman," as Lissack describes him, saying, “You were told no! A video of that no message has been recorded and saved. What is it about the word no that you do not understand? No means no!”
A video of the person watching the video is then encrypted to the cloud to use as future evidence if a victim wants to report an assault.
Nobody has access to these videos unless the victim decides to report the incident to the police, who will call the ISCE to retrieve the evidence. But this hasn't happened yet, Lissack said. Once someone has heard the cop's message or recorded someone saying "forced yes," he theorized, "They've lost any ability to argue that they were told 'yes' or they misconstrued a 'yes,'" which can be enough to prevent an assault in the first place.
But if an assault does take place, there's an app for that, too.
I've-Been-Violated lets victims record themselves recounting an instance of misconduct they've experienced and, like the first two apps, stores the footage securely in case the victim wants to contact police. When someone has testimony from within 24 hours of an assault, police are not required to subject them to as much questioning as they would if the victim came to them after a delay.
Only about 12.5 percent of college women report their assaults, and this app could help those who aren't ready to report right away save evidence in case they want to later. Lissack said many victims won't get a rape kit done because that requires them to file a report immediately. The app then allows them time to think on it while still storing evidence.
"If you wait to report, the authorities have to question you and your story and your credibility," Lissack said. "But if you give them contemporaneously recorded evidence that can be demonstrated never to have been tampered with, a lot of the credibility questions go away."
Lastly, the suite includes Party-Pass, which is meant for hosts of college parties. The app provides a QR code that can be printed out on posters and scanned by guests' phones. By scanning the code, they commit to the pledge, “For the next eight hours I pledge not to engage in sexual relations unless I have first had an explicit discussion about them with my prospective partner.”
We-Consent and I've-Been-Violated are free, while What-About-No is $5 (or free if you're a student at a participating school), and Party-Pass is only available at participating schools.
Lissack hopes all these apps remind college students and other users that when it comes to sexual consent, only "yes" means "yes." This has become a catchphrase to describe affirmative consent, he said, but really, "all of the meaning is in the word 'only.'"
