Introducing Jessica Ladd — Callisto
Jessica Ladd is the founder of Callisto, an online sexual assault reporting system that aims to create a more empowering reporting experience for survivors, provide authorities with better evidence on sexual assault, and facilitate the identification of repeat perpetrators. Callisto grew out of Jessica’s personal experience of sexual assault in college.
Jessica had previously also worked in policy in the White House, research at Johns Hopkins and co-founded an accelerator for student-initiated social innovation projects, before finally realizing that she felt most inclined toward technology as a tool for social change. Jess is also a TED fellow.
What is Callisto?
Callisto is an online reporting system for sexual assault survivors. Current reporting processes are really daunting and not very transparent. How can we transform this process to rebuild a sense of agency and empowerment? We allow survivors to make the choice that’s right for them, by making it easy to process what happened to you one step at a time. We give you the tools to make the right choice for you, to learn about the different reporting options available.
There are different ways to get started. You could reach out to your school directly, or simply document what happened electronically. You create what starts off as an anonymous record that is safe, encrypted and time-stamped. Even we can’t view it. If you are unsure or feel weird, and need to process what to document, you can write it down, and always have the option to come back to it later. But you never have to if you don’t want to. You can also add to the record, delete the record, download it, at any time.
At any point, you can choose to report the incident to your school’s Title IX office, to enter our matching system, or to keep anonymous to provide the school with aggregate data rather.
I think the coolest part is the matching system. It is designed for those who have experienced non-consensual sexual contact, and who might not want to report unless someone else had experienced a similar incident. One can submit the name and unique identifier of the perpetrator, but the information does not go anywhere unless another student comes forward. In that case, both survivors’ contact information will be sent to the school, and the school can follow up. The survivor can also share the timestamped record they created if they want.
If your motivation is to let the school know such things happen while maintaining anonymity, we can also provide your information as anonymous aggregated data without revealing your identity.
The goal is to provide a survivor with an array of options, and put the reporting process back into their control.
Tell us how you were inspired to start your social good initiative!
I was sexually assaulted while in college, and I waited over a year to report my assault. When I did, I found the reporting process to be more traumatic than the assault itself. I hoped to create the reporting systems that I wanted, that gave me the options I wanted and needed.
I’ve been a sexual assault nerd since I was 16. This is the field I’ve always wanted to be a part of and make change in. I initially focused on public policy and human sexuality. I interned at the White House Domestic Policy Council looking at policy around HIV/AIDS, and then went to grad school to research Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). All throughout, I had been interested in the broader category of sexual well being.
It’s such an important part of our lives, but there’s a lot of discomfort around the topic, and thus is a relatively under-resourced field. I was trying to figure out what the right path for me was — teaching, policy, research… and I fell in love with technology.
I developed my first website on STD education, which started off as a side project.
It felt like technology had this ability to meet people where they are at, to help them stay anonymous, and to reach people when they feel ashamed and vulnerable.
It had this ability to spread conversations that is really hard for humans to do. It could make a huge difference in areas where in-person resources are terribly scarce. And in areas where even if resources were great, one might not want to access them because of the shame associated with them.
For Callisto, we launched our first website in 2012. Three and a half years ago, I was reading all of these stories about students suing institutions around sexual assault. I was really inspired by these survivors going to the media to try to change the field, and thought to myself, it’s these young people who have so much more to lose than I do.
So I spoke publicly about the assault 3 years ago. At that time, my parents and friends had not known about what happened to me before. But I was inspired to start working on ideas.
It seemed like this movement was creating awareness within institutions, and incentivized them to change. If there was ever a time to change how this reporting process works, now is the time.
I started really researching the idea, talking to numerous survivors, experts in psychology, law, data security. It felt like a good idea that solved the problem in a real way.
We got our first funding from Google.org, and built out a team to build our MVP. It wasn’t that minimal an MVP, but it was probably the most secure MVP ever created! We launched and have been growing it since.
What was most difficult about starting Callisto?
I didn’t know how to code, I didn’t know how to draw mockups. I was drawing mockups in Microsoft Paint and printing them out to paste around my room. A lot of the skills I didn’t have, and I didn’t necessarily know what skills to look out for, so it was difficult to judge others’ skills without that tech background. I had the mission, but not the training. So I learned the basics of coding, messed up along the way, and learned what I liked and didn’t like. I also found some amazing people who would volunteer their time with us.
The other challenging piece was getting funding as a startup nonprofit. You’re often doing it with the barebones of an idea. Building a tech product can be really expensive, and you can’t really demonstrate its impact until you have launched something. There aren’t that many funders, and the space is highly competitive. We had to go on volunteer support for a while, but it was worth it.
But it was definitely a community and team effort, a really amazing community project. We had amazing talented people hacking together in coffee shops. I would buy people lunch and people worked away at it to develop a system that worked really well.
That first site was hard. Eventually I was able to have full-time hires. But for me, I had to have enough experience through other projects. You will learn a ton and mess up a ton.
What kept you going?
It was fun! It’s really fun to create something. I really believe in all of our initiatives — there was nothing that I felt wouldn’t change something. I really enjoyed the process and the product, of bringing other people to the work, and feeling a part of the team.
We really believe that what we’re building matters. It wouldn’t be worth the stress of building a company otherwise! With Callisto, there’s no issue I believe in more.
What’s a common misconception you’ve realized about doing tech for social good?
That you can’t do it unless you’re a technical founder. But you do need to find technical founders real quick. People are also often skeptical of nonprofits and don’t believe that nonprofits can create technology that can be disruptive. But nonprofits can create far better technology, because they understand the problems really well. You can enter spaces that don’t really have a market per se.
What resistance and criticisms do you face, and how do you personally deal with it?
I got a lot of pushback in grad school about using technology to solve health issues. The institution’s IRB (committees in research institutions that monitor research involving humans) did not recognize websites as a legitimate health intervention. I tried to fight it for a while, and realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in academia, and I left.
I tried for a while to see if I could take a leave of absence and return, but there are certain sectors that are easier to do technological innovation in, and academia was not one of those sectors. I moved to New York City, joined coworking spaces with other startup founders. I created a community for myself and other folks who are crazy the same way I’m crazy. I am still really good friends with a lot of those folks.
So I started the Social Innovation Lab to help innovators, particularly students, get their ideas off the ground. One of my friends whom I met there, I hung out with last week when I was in Boston. Another friend I saw at TED, and he was in the TED fellows program and encouraged me to apply.
Finding a peer support group is really critical, and if it doesn’t exist yet, create it. It’s so important to have a community.
What wakes you up in the morning?
Sometimes stress, sometimes my alarm clock!
But really, what gets me out of bed is that I don’t think that the way the world is now is the way it has to be. I think that a lot of the issues that might feel natural and normal today are mistakes in history, and we can change them. When it comes to sexual assault, it has almost become normalized in our society. I truly believe that we can create a world where sexual assault is rare or nonexistent. What keeps me going is hope, hope in that future that many survivors I talk to desire.
Be it my Uber driver, or someone I meet at a restaurant, they’ll tell me about their experiences, and these stories keep me going too. Imagine how much pain is out there, that people don’t talk about. And just how real the problem is.
Any advice you would give to someone who aspires to use tech for social good?
Do it. It is a huge under-resourced space where it is critical to have more people working in the area. There’s so much potential to make a change. Do your homework. Many people don’t really do the early work of research, so really understand the problem and challenge your own assumptions.
Do early interviews, surveys, prototyping, and do that work at the beginning as it will save you a lot of time.
Build up your skills. I kind of dived into this head first. In many ways, I wish I got a little bit more training first — it might have gotten me to social impact faster. I’d have learned skillsets and frameworks I could use to innovate with. It might have been a shortcut if I went to a tech company for while, instead of going “life is short, let’s make a change now.”
How can people get involved in what you’re working on?
Lots of ways! You can email contact@projectcallisto.org if you want to reach out or are interested in volunteer opportunities. Individuals can also donate to help us grow and reach more survivors!
Students and alumni have been really helpful forces in increasing awareness about Callisto at their universities. They can find more details at our website about how to get involved in that process.
Finally, we want to make sure our campus pilots are successful. We recently started one at Stanford, and there will be opportunities specific to the school to help students know that it’s there, and understand how it works. The nuance matters, and is complicated. We want to make sure students get it!
