SPOT App

How can you reduce the risk of date rape on college campuses?

During college, one in five women will be victims of sexual assault, and 85% of these incidents involve alcohol. Within the United States:

• 16-24 year olds have the greatest likelihood of becoming victims of sexual assault.
• Sanctions for sexual assault crimes are inconsistent across the country.
• Most cases of sexual assault are not reported to the appropriate authorities, due to a fear of social stigmatization and a perceived lack of initiative from said authorities.
• Many current solutions for sexual assault make the victim responsible for preventing an assault, making them – rather than the perpetrators – targets for blame.

To combat this, college fraternities have risk managers who work to prevent sexual assault from occuring. How can we help these risk managers to ensure date rape does not occur?

The Solution

SPOT is an integrated risk management system between a mobile application and wearable technology, which allows fraternity risk managers to utilize crowd-sourced information to mitigate risk, and preempt incidents of sexual assault, and more specifically acquaintance rape.

Our primary users are young college students and fraternity members, who are not only at a higher risk of being victims, but also at a higher risk of becoming a perpetrators of acquaintance rape.

Through the SPOT App, fraternity guests are able to anonymously report dangerous situations observed at an event to fraternity risk managers in a more immediate and efficient manner. Fraternity risk managers are notified of situations and the status of said situations via the SPOT Wristband through physical (vibration) and visual (light) feedback.

Fraternity risk managers are able to organize and resolve situations more quickly and efficiently through an in-app, risk manager to risk manager, messaging system.

For more information, visit: www.spot-app.us.

Sources

Krebs, C. P., Lindquist, C. H., Warner, T. D., Fisher, B. S., & Martin, S. L. (2007). The Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study.
New York State Coalition against Sexual Assault: http://nyscasa.org, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics. 1998 Alcohol and Crime Study 1998: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ac.pdf.
"Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2008 Statistical Tables: Demography of victims". Bureau of Justice Statistics. May 2011.