All over the world, there are sexual assault victims, relationship abuse victims, children stuck with unhealthy parents and so much more. We saw that people can be in tremendous difficult situations and something wish that they could raise their voices but for their own safety, they cannot. We wanted to give them a way to still have a voice but for it to not pose a threat to them. Taking this into account, our team created an environment for victims and supporters to come together and have a voice. For a victim to be able to share their story or thoughts, and for supporters to give some kind words or resources. CodeRed would not only provide a safe environment for anyone in need to speak up about their experience but is also a place to learn more information and get support from the community, which is an essential part of the recovery of sexual assault victims.
CodeRed is a web app which provides a safe environment with several services for people who are in abusive relationships, are sexual assault victims, or need support from others. The main goal of this app is to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard; thus, we have a forum where people can anonymously post their stories and get back replies from other users, knowing that it is anonymous to other users using Anonymous authorization through Firebase. Victims may also anonymously report incidents of assault and domestic or any other kind of abuse on the platform as they happen, and these reports are shared with local authorities if a particular individual has been reported multiple times. Also, we have a build in chat-bot which would help users to navigate around the website and get extra resources such as hotline numbers, contacts of legal authorities and medical workers who could help in their situation.
CodeRed uses Python, Flask, and Jinja for all the back-end work. The front end was done with HTML, CSS, and bootstrap. We implemented a database through Firebase to store the forum posts and their replies. There is also a chatbot on the site that will give the user information based on what they ask.
This project had many challenges. For one, we were all learning something new and that involved a lot of trial and error. One of the biggest non-technical challenges that we faced was to make the application initially incognito to an abuser/attacker/perpetrator so that they would not act against the victim. Additionally, women are not the only ones that can be victims of a sexual assault, dating violence, child abuse, suicidal thoughts and many more. We wanted to make something for everyone that needed it regardless of their gender identity, race or any other factor.
We are proud of creating something that can be some sort of support to others. If it can help someone, it is a success for us. Given the many challenges we faced, we think we created something good and something that has the potential to do so much good for others.
We learned to be aware of our time constraint. There are many things we would have loved to implement prior to the deadline but we had to prioritize if the functionality of the site. We were reminded that the pen is mighter than the sword, especially after not sleeping a lot. But overall, that communication is the biggest factor that can determine the success or failure of something.
The incident data can be used to geographically map wherein small communities sexual assault happens, wherein community children get abused and etc to provide users of the app information on safe walking routes and making them aware of what is going on in their environment encoring them to take actions. Although the web will be controlled by the admin to reduce chances of being abused online, in future we hope to train chatbot to recognize abusive comments and delete those posts to make our environment even safer.