In light of the recent disappearance of second-year College student Hannah Graham and several sexual assaults on and around Grounds, Student Council is promoting six mobile apps for student safety: Circle of 6, Kitestring, Tag - You're It, Hollaback, One Love My Plan, and First Aid by Red Cross.
Third-year College student Rachel Murphy, Council's Safety and Wellness Committee co-chair, said her committee began researching safety apps after learning that Virginia Commonwealth University was using the app “LiveSafe.”
“[VCU] experience[s] a significant amount of crime, just by virtue of the fact that it’s in downtown Richmond,” Murphy said. “So I thought that if this was something VCU could use and be happy with, that was definitely a testament to the capability that apps have.”
Murphy said the six apps will serve as “placeholders” until the University makes a partnership with a safety app which is more “comprehensive.”
“The six apps we are promoting are ones that don’t involve students being connected to a larger network,” Murphy said. “The apps … that have a picturing function, or a ‘text the police’ function require [University Police] to be a partner with that application.”
University Police do currently use a program called "TipSoft," which has desktop and mobile interfaces which allow users to anonymously submit crime tips to the police. In a September interview, Murphy said she hoped the University would adopt a partnership with LiveSafe, an application also used by Virginia Tech, which she said is more comprehensive and user-friendly than TipSoft.
Below are the six apps Council is promoting before the University is able to establish a relationship with a more comprehensive application.
Tag - You’re It was created by Pinchit, Incorporated. The app allows users to share their locations with any of their close friends, without advertising their location to everyone else using the app. “Tags” are completely private and at the discretion of the user.
Tag allows users to create friend lists of people, making it easier to send your location to multiple friends at once.
Along with merely saying the location of the initial sender, Tag allows users to snap a picture or a quick video of their location to send to friends, making it even easier to recognize where someone is. The “tag” can also include the sender’s location on a map below the picture.
One Love My Plan was created by Mongoose Projects, and is tailored to identifying and tracking relationship and intimate partner violence.
The app is designed for college-age women and their friends to relay personal accounts of partner violence. The app provides users with information on different types of partner violence as well as places where they can find additional information and support.
The app features a live chat function where users have 24-hour access to trained One Love My Plan advocates.
Circle of 6, created by human rights start-up Tech 4 Good is designed to allow users to quickly contact friends when they're in uncomfortable or dangerous situations. Users program the app with the contact information of six people they would like to be able to easily notify through four different actions.
One action gathers a user's GPS information and prepares an SMS message to send to the contacts which asks to be picked up at that location. Other actions ask for a distraction, ask for relationship advice, and display emergency phone numbers.
A customizable version of the application, Circle of 6 U, allows universities to tailor the application for their students.
First Aid by Red Cross is an interactive application for the iPhone, Android and Kindle Fire platforms designed to guide a user through everyday first aid situations with step-by-step instructions. Content is preloaded so no Internet connection is required to get immediate safety information.
The application makes it easy to contact EMS at any time and includes information for emergency situations like hurricanes and blackouts. Simple videos provide descriptions of actions to take in given scenarios.
This resource is useful in helping students to best take care of themselves and their friends when it comes to basic first aid.
Kitestring is a “safecall service” that checks up on users when they are in a potentially uncomfortable situation (i.e. walking at night, on a blind date, etc.)
Users tell kitestring where they are going and the expected duration of the trip. When the time amount the user has given Kitestring is up, the app will send a check-in text to the user, which users simply reply to. If the user hasn’t replied to the app in the estimated time of arrival, the app will alert the set emergency contacts something could be wrong. Users can notify Kitestring if they are running late.
Users without smartphones can sign up for Kitestring online, and use the service the same way a smartphone would be able to.
Hollaback is designed to promote bystander intervention against forms of street harassment. Users can report incidents of street harassment in real-time.
Users who witness or are the victim of street harassment can open the app, and then enter an account of what they saw and a picture of where the incident happened.
The app aims to increase government awareness of specific incidents of street harassment and encourage bystander education and intervention.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the application currently used by Virginia Commonwealth University. It is "LiveSafe," not "Live Faith."
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