Tech non-profit helping survivors report sexual assaults to close doors
An American non-profit using state-of-the-art technology to empower survivors of sexual violence will close its doors due to a funding shortfall next week.
Founded in 2011, Callisto provided an encrypted platform allowing survivors to secretly and securely document their assaults, explore their options and use time-authenticated recordings at a later date if they decided to report their assault to law enforcement.
“We have been forced to accept that—shy of a miracle occurring in the next week—there is simply no way to keep our doors open,” read a statement on the organization’s website.
According to Statistics Canada, 30 per cent of Canadian women over the age of 15 report being sexually assaulted at least once by someone they are not in an intimate relationship with.
Women account for 92 per cent of police-reported sexual assaults in Canada and are more than 30 times as likely as men to be the victims of intimate partner violence.
Sexual assault rates against Indigenous women are three times as high as those against non-Indigenous women.
Only six per cent of sexual assaults are reported to police in Canada, and fewer than half of those reports lead to criminal charges. Of the cases where charges are laid, only one in five proceed to a trial, and less than 12 per cent of those trials result in convictions.
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