Stopping abuse: Design principles for creating trauma-informed technology for tackling technology-facilitated gender-based violence
We’re investigating how to make technology safer for women & marginalised peoples
Orbits is a joint initiative of Chayn and End Cyber Abuse, producing a field guide for policymakers, technology companies and researchers on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TGBV). As part of this field guide, we want to explore the core design principles that can help tech platforms create safer environments for survivors of abuse online through prevention, mitigation and enforcement.
Chayn is a survivor-led community. Since 2013, many hundreds of hours of research, creating, testing, learning, unlearning and experimenting have gone into how Chayn’s design supports survivors of abuse — across different types of needs, languages, cultures and political landscapes. End Cyber Abuse is a collective of gender and human rights activists, lawyers and researchers working to end TGBV. End Cyber Abuse’s work includes advocating for survivor-centered, trauma-informed systems of justice and technology design.
As part of this project, we’re coming up with design principles that can help prevent and tackle gender-based violence, especially technology-facilitated. Based on Chayn’s experience, we’ve come up with these principles and now we want to open up our thinking to you so we can collectively examine the completeness and applicability of these principles. This is version one of our principles, based on our work to date. The principles will evolve as we consult with our communities and the wider ecosystem over the course of our Orbits project and beyond, as better practice is explored and refined across the globe.
Understanding trauma
Trauma is an emotional response to one or many terrible events that involves a risk of harm or danger to ourselves or others. The threat can be a threat to our life, such as assault; sense of self (as in emotional abuse); or our personal identities, like the everyday experiences of racism. Behaviours and norms that destroy, invalidate or erase our sense of identity, our wellbeing and sense of self can cause trauma.
A traumatic situation can evoke different reactions for different people. Trauma is never prescriptive. When internalised, trauma can make us feel frightened, humiliated, rejected, abandoned, trapped, ashamed and powerless. It makes us feel unsafe in our bodies, minds and within our wider communities.
The impact of trauma can affect a whole group of people — and even extend beyond life. Intergenerational or transgenerational or ancestral trauma generally refers to the ways in which trauma experienced in one generation affects the health and well-being of descendants of future generations. And it is only in this understanding, connection and community that there can be healing. Our lives intersect — and it’s our job as designers, creator, and organisers to nurture these environments: for our digital lives and services to replicate the external mechanisms that we have all internalised.
An evolving set of trauma-informed design principles
A literature review of trauma-informed practices will reveal many values but mostly focus on ensuring user safety and preventing re-traumatisation. In a physical setting, this would mean thinking about the reception space of a clinic or else removing triggering sounds, objects and smells from a treatment area.
Using the principles of trauma-informed care — and combining it with Chayn’s eight-years of experience in creating content and services for survivors of abuse across the world, our CEO Hera has narrowed down a design framework which helps us test, rationalise and question our product decisions. These values have long lived in a Notes folder in Hera’s laptop Macbook, which often comes out when we have team meetings.
We must not generalise or flatten user experiences into needs that neatly fit into one post-it. People live in a multi-dimensional world and therefore, our understanding of their needs, journey, challenges, fears, hopes and aspirations must hold space for that complexity and richness of nuance. We see these principles as a continuously-evolving guide to navigate that complexity with care.
Safety: We must make brave and bold choices that prioritise the physical and emotional safety of users. This becomes critical when designing for an audience that has been denied this safety at many points in their lives. Whether it is the interface of our platform or the service blueprint, safety by design should always be the starting point.
For example, Soul Medicine (Chayn’s micro-course platform providing bite-sized resources to help survivors on the path to recovery) enables users to personalise the delivery of emails for safety, such as choosing when to receive them and to choose ‘fake’ subject lines.
Trustworthy: Build trust with transparent, clear and consistent communication and design. People who experience trauma have often lived through internal and external unpredictability. Good, intentional user interface builds credibility in the first interactions — but it’s the service itself that will do the rest. One way to build trust is to be consistent and predictable.
For users of Bloom — Chayn’s web-based trauma-support service — this looks like receiving course videos on the same days of every week of the course, and consistent messages throughout the programme.
Plurality: To do justice to the complexity in human experiences, we need to suspend assumptions about what a user might want or need and thus account for selection and confirmation bias. A refugee might not be able to speak English but may be able to competently converse in “texting” English.
For example, our projects do not assume who speaks what language based on their location.
Agency: Abuse, inequalities and oppression strip people of agency. We must always make sure we do not use tactics of oppression to ensure we can redistribute power and agency by providing information, community and/or material support. Users and survivors of abuse should be a critical component to their own path to wellbeing, not silenced.
In Bloom, this looks like users being able to choose their pace for taking the course. Even though the schedule we send the videos on is fixed, there is no time restriction for them to watch those videos and get in touch with our team on live chat to discuss their learnings.
Open and accountable: For Chayn, this also means practising the values of openness and collaboration with our partners, banishing the spectacle of perfection performance and embracing the risk of failure that comes with holding uncertainty as dear as knowledge.
We reflect on our successes, challenges and failures through our blog, and open up our tech, content and even strategy.
This is one reason why in Bloom, users don’t simply participate in the courses — they shape them. We receive reflections, insights and ideas from participants throughout the course and explore these in a weekly recap video, as well as incorporating them into the design and delivery of future courses.
Solidarity: There is no single-issue human, therefore all of our interventions need to be designed with that in mind. Even if our services focus on one aspect, we need to signpost to other needs to provide the best relief.
This can look like having strong referral paths for survivors and using our power to support community-specific services such as those run by and for migrants, LGBTQIA+ survivors and sex workers.
Empathy: Abuse can leave us feeling like no one cares about us and, at times, that we don’t even care about ourselves. Empathetic, warm, soothing and minimally-designed interfaces and narrative should feel like a virtual hug, motivating people to both ask for and embrace the help we can offer. It should validate their experience as we seek out collaborative solutions.
This is why Chayn invests time and resources into the UX of all our tools and services, and does continuous user research and testing with survivors. Having survivors from different walks of life being part of the design process ensures we can create a welcoming space online.
Friction and privacy: We should remove unnecessary obstacles from users getting to the information and help they require, although some friction is necessary to protect user data and personal rights.
For us, this means not locking content behind sign up accounts but creating that pathway for those who need more security or personalisation, as in the case of Soul Medicine and YSM.
Hope: People who come to our services are often in positions of pain or of trauma. They do not need to be reminded of their own struggles, experiences or difficulties with harsh words and sad pictures — many of which are facsimiles of an abusive experience, organised in sensationalism rather than truth, or are shocking for the benefit of an audience rather than the survivor themselves. It’s scary and brave to reach out for help: our virtual spaces need to feel like an oasis for users, not another place of stress, Othering or misunderstanding.
For example, we begin every Bloom course video with a grounding exercise to help participants feel a mental distance from their daily lives and physical surroundings, and feel physically and psychologically present in Bloom’s online space.
What happens next
We’ll be testing, developing and refining these principles at a workshop for tech employees and activists on 21 July. To be the first to receive an invitation to this workshop, please email our Movement Builder Naomi Alexander Naidoo, and stay tuned for blogs on trauma-informed practice in research and policy.
