How new mobile app preserves sexual violence evidence
Mobile apps. The Survivors of Sexual Violence in Kenya Network, under the Wangu Kanja Foundation, has pioneered a mobile application that enables survivors and witnesses to report and document cases anonymously.
What you need to know:
- Evidence provided by witnesses is critical to criminal investigations and eventually to determining the fate of alleged perpetrators.
- Delays in recording witness accounts leads to systematic loss of such evidence because of memory lapses the later the information is taken.
Several factors constrain access to justice for survivors of sexual violence. One is the evidence provided by witnesses, which is critical to criminal investigations and eventually to determining the fate of alleged perpetrators.
Delays in recording witness accounts leads to systematic loss of such evidence because of memory lapses the later the information is taken.
To enhance immediate collection of evidence while witnesses’ memories are still fresh, the Survivors of Sexual Violence in Kenya Network, under the Wangu Kanja Foundation, has pioneered a mobile application that enables survivors and witnesses to report and document cases anonymously across the country. The information remains available to the survivors for retrieval and sharing with relevant actors.
This innovation is the theme of the 2022 study, “The Kenyan Survivors of Sexual Violence Network: Preserving memory evidence with a bespoke mobile application to increase access to vital services and justice” by Stevens, L.M., Reid, E., Kanja, W., Rockowitz, S., Davies, K., Dosanjh, S., Findel, B., and Flowe, H.D. and published in Societies.
This study tested the efficacy of the application “in preserving memory over time, and explored whether adapting [it] to include questions that enable serial crimes to be linked lead to more comprehensive accounts from witnesses".
It further explored whether inclusion of questions about the offender’s behaviour “increases the amount of information gathered from witnesses about offences, and the offender’s behaviour in particular”, to aid in identifying crimes committed by the same offender.
It “used a mock-crime experiment paradigm wherein participant witnesses watched a mock-crime video and then had their memory of the crime tested one week later” to measure memory accuracy.
The study established that “a recall attempt given immediately after witnessing a mock crime” using the application “preserved the memory recall accuracy rate over a one-week period and led to increased recall accuracy in comparison to a control group”.
This led to the conclusion that the application “can preserve memory recall over time”, implying that “the community can use [it] to gather accurate and essential details that can further investigations and prosecutions.”
However, the study noted that while recall accuracy remained constant, the number of details remembered decreased over time. This does not cohere with previous research, which established that participants maintain “a similar number of total details recalled at initial test and final test”.
The deviation was attributed to a number of factors, the main being that participants were not prompted during recall to report the behavioural patterns, thus they concentrated on narrating the main facts of the case.
Moreover, the data was collected remotely, hence did not benefit from the rapport established when it is done face to face. The study, therefore, opines that in the real situation where the network collects data physically, the number of details reported is likely to be higher.
A significant finding was that the control group had much lower recall accuracy. The study analogised this group to typical survivors who delay reporting to the police.
The relevance of the application then is that it can aid such survivors and witnesses to record information immediately after a crime is committed and rely on the same when reporting to the police.
The authors note, however, that the mock crime was not based on sexual violence but a different kind of offence where levels of trauma could be different. But it observes that trauma should not necessarily diminish the benefits of an early interview to preserve memory.
The study suggests that use of the mobile application “provides an opportunity to amplify survivors’ voices” and to circumvent the stigma around sexual offences that deter reporting.
Reliance on human rights defenders to use the digital technology to record survivors’ stories is noted to help in overcoming the latter’s poor access to the Internet.
The process also reduces re-traumatisation during reporting to multiple actors and enables crime to be documented even in situations where physical interactions are minimal.
The findings echo those in the 2014 paper’ “The adoption of mobile technology as a tool for situational crime prevention in Kenya” by Oduor, C., Acosta, F. and Makhanu, E, that mobile apps enable crimes to be reported anonymously and obviate physical reporting.
It is apparent that the app by the network should be popularised among agencies dealing with sexual offences, such as the police, health service providers and the Judiciary, for buy-in and eventual scale-up.
If adopted, it would transform the way sexual crimes are reported and reduce the traditional delays associated with person to person reporting of crime and documentation of details. One problem it is likely to face is that of resistance by conservatives used to the analogue way of doing business.
The writer is an international gender and development consultant and scholar ([email protected]).
