IT professionals seek solutions to street harassment

Some 140 students from Open Learning at Fontys ICT were given a so-called “pressure cooker assignment” early this week, which was dedicated to “We demand the night”. The aim: to come up with a solution to issues surrounding street harassment and domestic violence. On Thursday, the ideas were exhibited and Fontys, together with Stichting Stop Straatintimidatie and Welzijnsorganisatie Lumens, chose a winner.

Current
Lennart de Graaf is co-organiser of the project from Fontys and explains how this topic came about. "We have two such hackathons every year. The first is usually about a light-hearted topic, the second has a social purpose. But because of current events, we switched," he explains.

"After the summer holidays, within a few days we had two femicide cases in the news and eventually Lisa's murder. Then we thought, we have to do something with this. Especially because we also regularly hear from students that they experience unpleasant things in this area."

Raising awareness
So the subject is alive and well among students, and this was also reflected in their motivation for this project. Within three days - that was all they were given - they put out all kinds of ideas divided into 25 different groups. One focused on preventive help, the other on direct help in an emergency.

One of the groups developed a website that presents twenty different situations with two possible answers. For each option you choose, you get feedback on how you could possibly change your behaviour.

Another group came up with an application that prioritises safety by letting people walk through the city not alone, but together. Yet two other ideas focused on raising awareness of strange behaviour - intended for friends of potential attackers, in the hope of avoiding a possible unpleasant situation - and on victims, who can, for example, use a panic button to raise the alarm if they do not feel safe.

Winner
But the winning little group? That came up with Di-straction, an app designed mainly for welfare recipients. Student Thomas Claessens explains how it works: "The app pretends to be a navigation app. The tool has several features, such as the internet that can go down, a random reminder that suddenly pops up or a zoom error in a navigation map."

Are these bugs? No, definitely not. Or well, they are bugs, but conscious bugs. In fact, the app is designed to step up to a victim or street intimidator as an aide and stall for as much time as possible so that the victim can escape. "What we want to achieve with this is to activate a welfare worker to take action in an approachable way. After all, it can be quite difficult to walk up to a street harasser and say: hey, stop that. Our app can offer help."

Lennart de Graaf is happy with the ideas conceived, but perhaps even happier with the lesson students are learning through this. ‘The fact that we now have 150 young people here thinking about this problem is already a win.’

An article written by Bron