Three new College initiatives designed to improve campus safety — a new smartphone app, a sexual assault curriculum and an online consent manual — are now in various stages of implementation.
Director of Safety and Security Harry Kinne worked on the development of the app with a group of students and staff. They reviewed several alternative apps before deciding on LiveSafe, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator Amanda Childress said.
The app was promoted to members of the Class of 2019 during Orientation, when all incoming students were encouraged to download it onto their phone. The group is crafting a marketing plan for the rest of campus, she said.
The features of LiveSafe include a live chat text with Safety and Security, which can be made anonymous, she said. When reporting a crime, a user can also include photos or videos in their message. The app also features a safety map that shows where all emergency resources are on campus and can map reported incidents as well.
The reporting feature includes options for various types of offenses, including accidents, assault, abuse, disturbance, drugs and alcohol, hazing, harassment, mental health, sexual assault, suspicious activity, theft and vandalism, though the format is the same for each category.
Another feature is Safe Walk, which allows app users to connect with contacts who can watch their progress home on a map feature, Childress said.
“If I’m home in my dorm room, and I’m walking from the library to my room in the River, you can actually see me moving and it’ll let you know and text you when I get there,” she said.
The feature can also request safe rides and access the phone’s camera so the other user can watch the user walk home, she said.
The app is not Dartmouth-specific, but can be tailored to an individual college’s community and send alerts to users regarding campus-specific incidents, Childress said.
LiveSafe was founded by the victim of an assault on Capitol Hill and a survivor of the 2007 shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, LiveSafe vice president of marketing Eren Koont said.
“They took the tragedy that was in their lives and used that as motivation and decided that they could do something to make the world a safer place by taking advantage of the technology that everyone has in their hands,” he said.
The app was first launched with campus partners in the fall of 2013 and has grown from a primarily Virginia-based app to having campus partnerships in over 30 states, as well as partnerships with corporations and businesses, he said. In the state of Virginia, 75 percent of students have access to LiveSafe, he said, and development is still primarily driven by student feedback.
“We have a joke here that we don’t change the font in the app without talking to students first,” he said.
Though the company does not disclose data from partner campuses, Koont said that universities have shared anecdotal evidence of the app’s effectiveness, for example, Virginia Commonwealth University partially attributed a recent 40 percent reduction in crime to the work with the technology.
John Damianos ’16, a member of the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” presidential steering committee, became familiar with the app through undergraduate advisor training and said one particular strength is the user-friendliness of the interface.
“When a person is in trauma, small boxes of text or a lot of text or confusing navigation is not helpful at all,” he said.
The ability to text Safety and Security is also very useful, he said.
“I think we can all come up with potential scenarios where people are in a place where they don’t feel safe and also don’t feel safe whipping out their phone, making a phone call, calling [Safety and Security], telling them their ID number, telling them where they are,” he said.
The online consent manual is not yet live, though Title IX coordinator and Clery Act compliance officer Heather Lindkvist is working on it with a student group, Childress said. Though the College has extensive material relating to the issue of consent, the development of this manual was actually a student request under “Moving Dartmouth Forward,” she said.
“For a lot of students, they feel very comfortable with consent and what it means, and for other students they may feel uncomfortable in certain scenarios and situations,” she said.
The manual will differ from other materials in that it is discussion-based and includes examples of scenarios where consent may have been difficult to manage or interpret, Childress said, including situations involving alcohol.
“I think it becomes more of a discussion, because most assaults end up being around issues of consent,” she said.
Senior associate dean of student affairs Liz Agosto said that the College has done a good job clarifying its policy language surrounding consent, and the manual will turn policy language into examples to teach definitions of consent and explore gray areas.
“The consent manual’s intention is to help educate the community around what positive consent looks like, how to ask for consent,” Agosto said.
The four-year mandatory sexual assault prevention education plan is in the pilot stages, with working groups creating the framework of what the plan would entail, she said. New pilots that debuted during Orientation this year include Lindkvist’s lecture about a community of respect and Dartmouth Bystander Initiative’s more prominent role on campus, Childress said. The groups are also working with the office of residential life to develop programming, she said.
Current working groups are identifying the intended outcomes of such a program, with development moving at an intentionally slow pace, Agosto said. Focus groups will work during fall term to evaluate the Orientation programs.
“The four year curriculum is a longer-term implementation plan,” she said. “It’s not going to all be done in the first year, it’ll build on itself while we try to get it really right.”
The only other institution that has a similar four-year program is the United States Naval Academy, so working groups spent time looking at their program for some guidance, Childress said.
The Academy is a few years into its program and has seen success from an evaluative standpoint, she said. This program served as a good reference point, though the experience at the College will also be informed by other research and studies, she added.
“We’re looking at a logic model and making sure what we do incorporate is well planned, research, informed and really tailored to the Dartmouth student and the Dartmouth experience,” she said.
Kinne could not be reached for comment.