An App to Help Sexual Assault Survivors Access Emergency Medical Care

This article discusses sexual violence. If this is a challenging topic for you, please resource yourself and practice appropriate self-care.

One of the most traumatizing things about being sexually assaulted is that your body becomes a crime scene.

Rape victims often describe visiting the health center to get emergency treatment as a "second rape" because of the lack of appropriate psychological care.

Someone who has experienced a traumatic crime is most likely going to be revictimized by the people who are supposed to help. That's horrible.

So since 2015, I've been working with a coalition from around the world to create a mobile app resource to help sexual assault survivors navigate the health system. We call it the Rape Crisis Counseling app.

We started out with seed donations and some crowdfunding and developed a resource that can be used as a training primer for would-be rape crisis counseling volunteers anywhere in the world. The app is available free for iOS and Android.

All too often, medical staff blame the victim and don't adequately address the criminal or traumatic nature of sexual assault.

So the app basically acts as an in-hand resource for survivors and their advocates to get the emergency care they need.

Even when healthcare workers are trained to support survivors, they are often impatient or rushed during the delicate steps of the forensic evidence collection exam, when the survivor consents to invasive and often painful procedures that yield evidence to use later in court.

Trauma-informed care for sexual assault survivors is available from only the most resourced health centers in a few places in the world, with no clear way to scale.

Police, when they are summoned, are often inept at taking information for police reports without engaging in similar, if not worse, behavior that perpetuates rape myths, shifts accountability and blames the victim. This does not result in a system that successfully prosecutes and prevents rape as a crime.

Considering the global statistics that one in four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime (or one in three, if you are Indigenous), most health systems around the world are doing a terrible job of supporting us.

This isn't just a women's issue. People in the LGBT community are far more vulnerable to sexual assault, and men are very much affected too.

And this isn't just an issue for survivors. It's also important for the friends and family who want to support them on their long road of healing.

Knowing the right thing to do after sexual assault is like knowing first aid or CPR.

My journey with this issue started back in 2015, when Jina Moore wrote a story for Buzzfeed that attracted my attention because of the complicity and lack of support shown by the survivor's humanitarian aid employer about her workplace safety.

After a few months of research, I could see the breadth of the issue and how sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously compromise women's longterm safety in the global workplace. The cumulative effects of this are staggering to think about.

Yet there were no digital resources available to help navigate the aftermath of sexual assault, and certainly not internationalized ones.

It seemed like the best being done was to refer survivors to an under-funded, under-supplied and under-staffed health center to get care that they probably couldn't afford and might not even be available. Considering the severity of trauma experienced by survivors of sexual assault, and how many people go through this, this is simply unacceptable.

Police, in some areas, are just as likely to rape a survivor who reports sexual assault as they are to move the case forward. And in many conservative religious countries, family law does not recognize the rights of many women (for example, wives) to even experience rape, or piles crime upon crime by forcing a child to marry her rapist, which still happens in the US and elsewhere. We have so much work to do.

I get angry about this, so after complaining that more people should be doing something, I decided to equip survivors and their advocates with the medical advocacy and knowledge they need to navigate an often hostile health system.

And I built an app. Now that you know about the resource, the next time you encounter someone who might need it, I hope you'll share.

If you want to help, please leave a positive review on the app store. Our users have been reluctant to do this so far, which makes sense. It's up to us advocates to make sure the app is visible and easy to find when survivors search for resources.

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