A new piece of technology – Safe with Milli – is being piloted in parts of Canada, including eastern Ontario, as well as in Australia. It’s touted as a way to keep survivors of intimate partner and gender-based violence safe by connecting them with services and information.
The app will help survivors find and navigate the many systems they may need to access as they negotiate their safety. This includes community services as well as police and other institutional systems. Survivors can document incidents of abuse and keep track of banking information, passports, health card information and the like in a cloud-based location for ease of access through a secure inbox that is “end-to-end encrypted.”
This sounds pretty appealing. We know that women who engage with different systems have to tell their stories again and again, and we know how traumatizing that can be. Telling a story multiple times means that it gets told differently one time from another, which can create difficulties when that story is evidence in a legal proceeding.
Being able to connect with a wide range of services through one entry point also sounds like a good thing. Often, survivors don’t know what services are out there, so having a sort of virtual one stop shop could be helpful. With the survivor’s consent, those services will be able to share information with one another, relieving the survivor of this task.
Kudos to Genvis, the woman-founded, Australian tech company that has come up with this personal safety app. As the company website says:
“Gender-based, intimate partner and family violence is rampant in our communities. Some governments have declared it an epidemic. Many have made reducing it a priority. Few have made meaningful progress.”
But will it work?
Despite the promises offered by Safe with Milli, I have some concerns.
Helpful as this tool may be for individual women – perhaps even for thousands of individual women — it is reactive rather than proactive. It’s something for survivors to use once they have already been victimized by their intimate partner. It does nothing to address the systemic reasons that IPV/GBV exists; it does not move us in the direction of preventing IPV/GBV from happening.
Of course, prevention is a big task. It means making revolutionary changes to legal, political, social, economic and other systems – changes many of those systems are not willing to make. We will have to end women’s economic inequality; create systems that ensure meaningful political and social equality, and look at legal responses to IPV/GBV very differently than we have to date. It will take, to use the language of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission and the Roadmap for a National Action Plan on Violence Against Women, an “all of society” approach, which will be quite a change from the piecemeal, band aid approach currently applied to IPV/GBV. But this is the only way we will bring an end to it.
In the meantime, survivors need to be safe, which brings us back to Safe with Milli.
It isn’t fail proof
Short of the death of the abuser, there is nothing that can be guaranteed to keep a survivor safe; at best, we can create systems that keep her safer than she might be without those systems. Even with all of the protections that Safe with Milli can offer, it can’t stop a determined abuser from causing further harm.
As we should have learned by now, abusers have an unerring ability to circumvent almost any system created to protect victims of IPV/GBV. Mandatory charging sounded great in the mid-1980s, but we have seen how abusers twist the facts to make themselves look like the victims. Parental alienation has been weaponized by abusers against mothers who simply want to ensure that their children are safe.
Nowhere is this more true than in the electronic world, where abusers have learned how to hack into their partner’s technology; hide spyware in their phones, kids’ toys, cars and homes; send abusive messages via bank’s e-transfer systems and so on.
No matter how carefully Genvis has built its firewalls and security systems, they are not impenetrable. Imagine what an abuser could do if he had access to, for example, the evidence his former partner was planning to use in the their family court case; if he could track every service she was accessing; her new bank account number; the contact information for her support people; . . .
What if the technology fails, and information the woman believes she has safely stored on the app is suddenly not available to her? How will Safe with Milli work in rural and remote locations, where internet access is often unreliable or non-existent? What will happen to all her information if Genvis shuts down operations?
Finally, I am concerned that some women may access this technology without having its pros and cons first explained to them by someone who has an intersectional feminist analysis of intimate partner violence. In particular, I worry that survivors may not be made aware of important issues relating to privacy and confidentiality, so they can make informed decisions about what information they share – and with whom — on the app.
I hope these issues are being considered through the testing phase of Safe with Milli, so that it is, as it intends to be, a way for women to be safer than they might otherwise be.
I agree with your concerns that nothing is fool-proof or abuser-proof in Intimate Partner Violence. Abusers today are very skilled at getting out of the criminal charges laid against them. In my own case, (I am eighty-six years old) when I called the police about my husband’s angry and threatening behaviour in August of 2021, the police took my statement down on a cell phone. Not by hand. I was then assigned a Crown Attorney in my district. I was under the misunderstanding that the Crown Attorney was there to represent me. I was assigned a counsellor from Victim Witness Assistance and I was not allowed access directly to the Crown Attorney. The young police officer involved (not a domestic abuse officer) then lost my audio statement, I was never told of its loss, nor was I asked to replace it. Thus, in April 2022, the Crown Attorney dismissed the charge of assault against my husband, who was 85 at the time. Her reasons for doing so: loss of police evidence, the abuser was 85 years old (disregarding the victim (me) at 84 who had been assaulted three times, the last leaving me with a permanent injury) and the COVID backlog in the courts. Case dismissed. The abuser claims he never assaulted me in all the years of our marriage (33). This is just one example of what can happen to a victim despite all the service agencies that are put into place to help support victims. What doesn’t happen is that the federal and provincial governments do not make an effort to support victims of abuse. They talk a good story, they put websites up listing the many agencies to contact if you’ve been abused. They don’t fund the courts with judges or staff, courts are darkened. Anyone who has experienced Intimate Partner Violence knows that abuse happens behind closed doors and abuse silences the victims. So how can any agency deal with those two realities of Intimate Partner Violence? It is still a “he said/she said” issue for judges in the courts if the charge gets that far. A victim truly has very little opportunity of defending herself, for she is most often not believed and the perpetrator gets to walk free.