Super-savior: A System to Aid Combating Harassment and Violence Against Women Tanzila Choudhury Department of CSE Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh t_c_trina@yahoo.com Bashima Islam Department of CSE Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh bashimaislam@gmail.com A. B. M. Alim Al Islam Department of CSE Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh alim_razi@cse.buet.ac.bd ABSTRACT The emerging usage of information and communication tech- nology (ICT) can play a vital role to aid combating harass- ment and violence against women. A few Smartphone ap- plications (apps) have been developed in this regard which often may not be helpful in crucial moments. Hence, we propose here a complete system (Super-savior system) com- bining a Smartphone application (Super-savior app) with a paired hand-wearable device (Super-watch) that will send emergency messages to three nearest police stations and pre- set contact numbers mentioning user’s current location. We also discussed an advanced version of this system for prac- tical application. Keywords ICT, violence against women, Super-savior, Super-watch 1. INTRODUCTION Violence against women (VAW) is a technical term used to collectively refer to violent acts that are primarily or ex- clusively committed against women [5]. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that women are most of the vic- tims of worldwide violence. Specially, the women in devel- oping countries, such as Bangladesh, are the worst victims [7]. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play a vital role in battling against the violence such as harassment and abuse. Several approaches have been pro- posed to combat this situation through developing Smart- phone applications [9]. However, in extreme cases, the already-proposed approaches may not be useful due to several reasons such as prone to quick hijacking. Hence, we propose a solution system for combating harassment and violence against women named Super-savior which is simple, fast, reliable and easy-to-use even in extreme situations. Consequently, we make the fol- lowing contributions in this paper: 1) We propose of a simple hand-wearable device named Super-watch with a SOS but- ton to press in emergency cases to activate a specific Smart- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. . phone application, 2) Afterwards, we present a new Smart- phone application, Super-savior App which will send alert messages with the user’s current location to the three nearest police stations and three pre-set contact numbers whenever activated, and 3) Finally, we discuss a possible advanced version of the proposed system. 2. MOTIVATION In recent times, 35% of women worldwide have experi- enced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime [7]. The scenario is even worse in developing countries such as Bangladesh. Moreover, statis- tics suggest that oppression of women increased to severe extent over the last four years. For example, in 2012, at least 805 women were raped (13% more than in 2011), 822 were victims of dowry violence (59% more than in 2011), 78 were victims of acid violence (16% more than in 2011) [3]. Nonetheless, research studies demonstrate that most women do not even report their harassment to police, therefore the actual number of victims may be much higher [7]. To lessen the extent of harassment, research studies em- phasize on exploiting versatile devices such as Smartphone. More specifically, studies focus on useful Smartphone appli- cations (apps). The reason behind this focus is the large number of app users. For example, in 2012, 1.2 billion peo- ple around the world were using mobile apps and the number is increasing by 29.8% every year [2]. As the number of app users is increasing worldwide, the effect is felt in developing countries such as Bangladesh as well [2]. Consequently, different apps have been proposed in recent times for combating the harassment. Examples include “Cir- cle of 6”, “Fight-back”, and “Vith-U” Smartphone apps [9]. These apps can send the user’s location via GPS, GPRS enabled GSM module to pre-programmed contact numbers along with an SOS message after pressing a button. “Fight- back” can also be linked to Facebook [9]. However, research in Argentina shows that a woman’s mo- bile phone is one of the first items to be snatched or de- stroyed by a violent partner [8]. Moreover, in emergency cases, getting a phone out of pocket or bag and pressing one of its buttons may take significant amount of time. Such issues can be addressed through using a hand-wearable device which can communicate with Smartphone through an app when an emergency button of the hand-wearable device is pressed. Hence, we propose a system compris- ing a hand-wearable device and a new Smartphone appli- cation to combat harassment and violence. Our proposed hand-wearable device requires simple hardware design which