Chicabot: my first attempt to serve the immigrant community with a chatbot
I needed to reach an audience who is isolated and often facing privacy issues: immigrant women who are victims of domestic violence. Here is what happened.
When it comes to statistics about domestic violence and women’s safety in the U.S., odds are not in immigrants’ favor.
As of 2018, the U.S. had the third highest rate of sexual violence in the world. On a typical day, domestic violence hotlines nationwide receive over 20,000 calls. Every nine seconds a woman is beaten. Domestic violence is also one of the main reasons behind homelessness in New York City, but affects minorities more: 58% of people experiencing homelessness in the city are African-American and 31% Latino.
Chicabot was born to fulfill two information gaps I identified in the Brazilian immigrant community thanks to the help of two immigration attorneys, Stephanie Melcock and Michelle Viana:
1 — Women think that domestic violence only comprises physical violence, which is not true. Financial and psychological abuse by a partner are considered domestic violence.
2 — Women don’t know there is U.S. legislation and resources available to help immigrant women who find themselves in an abusive relationship. The U visa helps undocumented women to adjust their status, while the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) allows spouses of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to self petition a green card without the partners’ acknowledgement.
The idea of a chatbot that gives information about the resources available to help immigrant women had been brewing for a while. It all started when I was doing my audience engagement internship at Documented, a nonprofit newsroom that covers immigration in New York.
One day, a woman sent a message to Documented’s WhatsApp asking about VAWA. She was a victim of abuse, she said. The team, including myself, was thrilled to be of help, but the task proved to be harder than we expected; With so much information and legal details, the reply looked a little overwhelming.
That moment, I put myself in her shoes and realized that getting all that info at once was enlightening but also intimidating. For women already feeling vulnerable, ashamed and suffering from low self-esteem — which is a direct consequence of facing abuse — the will to reach out to the government and ask for help can be as frail as thin ice.
This woman was from the Dominican Republic, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latino immigrants are half as likely than non-immigrants to seek help for domestic violence from institutions (6.9% vs. 14.7%). They often feel trapped in abusive relationships because of immigration laws, language barriers, social isolation and lack of financial resources.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is a roadblock in and of itself. Undocumented victims are often told by their abusive spouses that they will be deported if they go to the authorities.
But she had taken the first step and decided to reach out to humans for information — journalists. I believe she was also looking for something beyond a guide of how to self-petition a green card. After all, she had Google for that.
As journalists, we are often thinking about the content of our work, and paying very little attention to the format and medium that would serve our audience’s best interest.
“How cool would it be to get information about domestic violence in a more casual, chill way, and from someone who sounds like a very knowledgeable, and at the same time, loving and trustworthy friend?” I thought.
Then Chicabot was born
There was a need in this community: information about a serious topic, but delivered in a way that is easy on the eye and the ear. I thought I had found a perfect fit for it: a chatbot.
A chatbot could offer a different experience of information consumption by mimicking a private conversation, allowing the user to dictate the pace in which information was delivered.
There was a problem, though: As a journalist, I had no background in coding. But this semester, the 2019 social journalism class was lucky to learn from John Keefe, who is the head of the Quartz Artificial Intelligence Studio. He introduced us to several open source softwares and it was during one of his classes that Chicabot came to life.
Prototyping
The first version was developed with Dexter app, and included information about VAWA and the U visa, both tools that allow abused women to adjust their immigration status.
The information was collected from the U.S. government’s official channels, and rewritten in a much more comprehensive way.
In the end of the conversation, Chicabot would show a link to a survey, that asks, among other things, the areas where I could improve user experience.
Here is a demo of the conversation:
Before I asked members of my community to try it, I had two professors chat with Chicabot: Jeremy Caplan and John Keefe. I tweaked the bot according to their feedback and sent it to members of my community. To my surprise, once I posted the prototype’s link on Facebook groups with Brazilian women, different errors were reported:
- “It’s a blank screen”
- “I see the chat but there is nothing there”
- “I tried saying hello but it didn’t respond”
- “The bot stopped responding out of the blue”
However unsuccessful, the initiative would always receive compliments from the people who had been willing to try it. They would even show frustration for not being able to make it work.
From the people who tried and managed to reach the end of the chat, I received two solid pieces of feedback:
“You should have links to organizations that attend and council women victims of violence”
“If you don’t click on all the answers you cannot end the chat”
So my lesson was that although there are many apps out there that allow you to build a chatbot without really knowing how to code, it doesn’t guarantee in any way that you will have an actual working prototype.
Next steps
Chicabot is one of the services offered by the Women Against Violence Experiment (W.A.V.E.,) a cross-platform I have developed for my social journalism practicum at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The project follows the idea that as the experts in delivering information, journalists need to be able to explore new and more effective ways to inform marginalized communities.
The goal now is to adjust the glitches in the prototype, translate it to Portuguese and Spanish, and incorporate the feature to W.A.V.E.’s Facebook page. That way, members of the community will be able to access it through W.A.V.E.’s messenger feature.
A word on revenue streams
I learned the expression “for profit and for purpose” from Zebras Unite, a movement that challenges the start-up culture that prioritizes immediate revenue over sustained growth. This is how I see Chicabot: a great opportunity to generate revenue and, at the same time, bring change.
The beauty of chatbots is that you can constantly feed them new information, which means they don’t go obsolete. You can use it several times and have different experiences. Since chatbots mimic a conversation, why not promote services or products during the chat? Isn’t that what we do in real life anyway? We talk about our problems and suddenly there we are talking about this new shampoo that is doing wonders to our hair.
I would love to promote immigrant-owned businesses in Chicabot, like catering services, beauty salons and anything that provides a link to their native home.
Conclusion: journalists need to be savvy
When I was in college in Brazil one of my reporting professors said that journalists are nothing more than “generalists;” they know a little about many things, but don’t know a lot about anything.
I don’t know if this is still true for working journalists these days and in this country, where the beat culture is present in most newsrooms. But what I do know is that we should definitely go beyond our preferred ways to produce content (the print-TV-audio) and explore what kids in Palo Alto are coming up with. Technology is out there to serve us journalists too.
If you can, please try the chatbot and let me know if you were able to use it. Fill in this form when you are done. Thank you in advance for your feedback!
