🧿 Understanding Online Trauma
9 Principles by Hera Hussain of Chayn for servicing people who experience abuse.
Recently, we received a reader email that caught our immediate attention. Hera Hussain — the founder of Chayn, a non-profit, open-source project using tech to empower women and non-binary people facing oppression and abuse — reached out to share a post she had written about trauma-informed design and designing interfaces that uplift. Her post got us talking about online trauma as an organization: How do we communicate about it? How do we address it culturally?
So we spoke with Hussain by Google Meet from her home in Manchester, UK, to better understand her mission and the realities of abuse that occurs online and through social media.
From image-based sexual abuse, doxxing, deep-fakes, and cyberstalking, Chayn takes a holistic and global approach to helping women understand their rights and develop a means to combat abuse. Since 2013, Chayn has worked with over 400 volunteers from over 15 countries to build open source toolkits in many languages, like “How To Build Your Own Domestic Violence Case Without A Lawyer Guide” and “How Someone Can Track You Online & Offline and What You Can Do About It”.
Tech-facilitated (or enabled) gender-based violence, or TGBV, is a growing phenomenon of online behaviors, perpetuated by one or more individuals, where digital tools and technology are used to harass, intimidate, surveil, or inflict violence on victims. Hussain says that online abuse suffers from the narrative and the media representation of a battered victim. The terminology is important and Chayn prefers “manipulation and relationships” to inform a broader audience. Chayn relies on search engines to direct potential victims to their services. Hussain says women tend to search using more exploratory language to deal with the grief they are feeling: How can I make my partner hurt me less? How can I change my relationship? Why does this keep happening to me? Why do I feel low?
This type of trauma is happening to women in Pakistan and India, just as it’s happening in Colombia and Argentina, so Chayn works to make their services inclusive and applicable to as many cultures as possible and in multiple languages. One hurdle they have come up against is collaborating with UX designers.
In 2016, Chayn worked to design mobile applications for women and girl refugees at the height of the conflict in Syria. The prototype had a chat element to it and the UX designer didn’t believe that the migrants would know what a chat bubble was or that they would understand what the animation of three dots means. That realization was “very triggering” for Hussain because the designer came to the project with their own biases and stereotypes of what refugees might understand about phone and technology.
Hussain says this is the moment she stepped away from working with UX designers in this way. The “best in practice” approach would not service the organization’s needs. “When you take out the adaptability from that design practice, then it's a form of violence,” she says. “You're literally imposing a set structure that may not fit that particular situation, and you're insisting that you are right and the user is wrong, the community is wrong. That's where the power and privilege really clashes.”
Hussain says when you're designing for a broad audience, you have to hold many different needs and situations in mind at once. Human-centered design practices have the right tools and values, but if designers are dogmatic and inflexible, then those processes and tools are useless. She says, “People forget that it’s just a template that you're supposed to break and pull together.”
Below are Hussain’s nine principles (as she first published them on Medium) for servicing communities or individuals who have experienced trauma and focus on ensuring user safety and preventing re-traumatization. They are reproduced here with permission. In her original post she writes, “People live in a multi-dimensional world and therefore, our understanding of their needs, journey, challenges, fears, hopes and aspirations must hold space for that complexity and richness of nuance.”
9 Principles
Safety: We must make brave and bold choices that prioritise the physical and emotional safety of users. This becomes critical when designing for an audience that has been denied this safety at many points in their lives. Whether it is the interface of our platform or the service blueprint, safety by design should always be the starting point.
Trustworthy: Build trust with transparent, clear and consistent communication and design. People who experience trauma have often lived through internal and external unpredictability. Good, intentional user interface builds credibility in the first interactions — but it’s the service itself that will do the rest. One way to build trust is to be consistent and predictable.
Plurality: To do justice to the complexity in human experiences, we need to suspend assumptions about what a user might want or need and thus account for selection and confirmation bias. A refugee might not be able to speak English but may be able to competently converse in “texting” English.
Agency: Abuse, inequalities and oppression strip people of agency. We must always make sure we do not use tactics of oppression to ensure we can redistribute power and agency by providing information, community and/or material support.Users and survivors of abuse should be a critical component to their own path to wellbeing, not silenced.
Open and accountable: For Chayn, this also means practising the values of openness and collaboration with our partners, banishing the spectacle of perfection performance and embracing the risk of failure that comes with holding uncertainty as dear as knowledge.
Solidarity: There is no single-issue human, therefore all of our interventions need to be designed with that in mind. Even if our services focus on one aspect, we need to signpost to other needs to provide the best relief.
Empathy: Abuse can leave us feeling like no one cares about us and, at times, that we don’t even care about ourselves. Empathetic, warm, soothing and minimally-designed interfaces and narrative should feel like a virtual hug, motivating people to both ask for and embrace the help we can offer. It should validate their experience as we seek out collaborative solutions.
Friction and privacy: We should remove unnecessary obstacles from users getting to the information and help they require, although some friction is necessary to protect user data and personal rights.
Hope: People who come to our services are often in positions of pain or of trauma. They do not need to be reminded of their own struggles, experiences or difficulties with harsh words and sad pictures — many of which are facsimiles of an abusive experience, organised in sensationalism rather than truth, or are shocking for the benefit of an audience rather than the survivor themselves. It’s scary and brave to reach out for help:our virtual spaces need to feel like an oasis for users, not another place of stress, Othering or misunderstanding.
Read the entire Medium post from which this processing first appeared. Follow Chayn and Hera Hussain on Twitter.
Chayn has found that people with marginalized identities face further structural barriers when accessing government and non-governmental support. Through ongoing community workshops titled “Orbits”, Chayn applies an intersectional lens to policy development and lays out how governments can better understand and tackle systemic inequality. “Orbits” is a collaboration between End Cyber Abuse and Chayn, funded by Robert Bosch Stiftung Foundation to explore intersectional responses to gender-based violence. If you are interested in participating or learning more, click here.
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Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.