Summary:
To help stop abuse and sexual assault, develop small smart speakers hidden in homes and in apps on phones, which automatically turn on when a specific sentence is used and then start recording and uploading the audio and the location to a secure cloud monitored by police, providing a safe way for individuals in trouble to contact the police and a bank of evidence to use for prosecution.
Policy:
Domestic abuse and sexual assault remain far too common in society, and prosecution rates far too low either to create effective deterrents or to prosecute the guilty and protect society from them through imprisonment.
A significant problem seems to be the lack of evidence deemed reliable in court and the unwillingness of some victims to come forward due to fear of the consequences both from public backlash and also further violence by their abuser, all increased by the low rate of prosecution making coming forward an even higher risk.
To help overcome some of these problems, I suggest government works with tech firms and the police to develop small smart speakers which can be hidden around homes and to develop ‘hidden apps’ on phones (i.e. an app which can be installed onto the phone, but is not visible in case an abuser gets access to the phone to check it).
The smart speakers and hidden apps would all be voice-activated, a bit like with ‘Ok Google’, except with a phrase specific to the individual; something which would be easy for them to say in any situation without arousing suspicion.
When that phrase was uttered, the speaker or app would start recording and upload the audio in real-time to a secure cloud monitored by the police (both manually and using AI algorithms) to identify when and where abuse was taking place and send police to intervene.
Even in situations where police did not identify abuse (for example, where there was such a volume of uploads, they could not sift them all), the recording would be kept and used as evidence for prosecution, providing objective evidence of abuse or sexual assault to overcome the current problems when it is ‘their word against mine’.
The law would need to be changed to ensure that all recordings were made admissible in a court of law, and resource would need to be applied to monitoring the recordings and ensuring the safety of the cloud server from hacking, but all these things should be achievable.
If it proved to be successful, these hidden apps could be deployed more widely to enable people to call for help when they feel unable to call the police; there is already a system in place where a caller to the police can press an extra number to say they can’t speak, and there have been examples of people pretending to call pizza takeaways as cover for calling the police. These hidden apps could make that process far easier, improving the safety of the public at large both in the home and out and about.
This policy will not solve the problem of domestic abuse or sexual assault in and of itself. We need to work much harder on changing social values about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, particularly amongst men.
And even with this solution, tech firms and the police would need to iterate and innovate to stay ahead of criminals who would try to identify ways to prevent such tech from working.
But it could prove a big help, not only to provide crucial evidence to prosecute violent criminals and better protect vulnerable children and women, but also to enable police to actively intercept more abusive crimes while they were taking place and the victims would otherwise have no way to call for help.
1837-11