Women’s Day: NGO wants technology to combat violence – 08/03/2023 – Market

“This is my sister,” says Israeli activist Lili Ben Ami as she shows, via video call, an album with photos of Michal Sela. “She loved her life. She was a strong woman, no one told her what to do.”

The social worker was murdered by her husband in October 2019, aged 32. The crime took place at her home in Moza, near Jerusalem. The assailant strangled and stabbed her repeatedly and walked around the neighborhood 17 hours after the attack asking for help, with their eight-month-old daughter in his arms. He is currently serving a life sentence.

The brutality of the murder motivated Lili to found, six months later, the Michal Sela Forum, an NGO that supports technological initiatives to combat violence against women. Innovation in this field, she says, is overlooked.

“Airbnb was disruptive for tourism; Facebook for communication. We want to make that same impact in the fight against domestic violence”, he says. “Innovation saves lives in so many fields. What we’ve done is take these incredible minds and technologies and put them into the fight against violence against women.”

The organization’s main initiative to promote change is an event called a hackathon, a programming marathon with professionals trying to find solutions to a problem — in this case, gender violence. So far, three editions have already been held with partners such as Google, Meta and Microsoft.

The family was in shock after the murder. No one close to the couple had ever seen the aggressor raise his voice to his partner. At the time, Lili reached out to experts to find answers to her questions. Why was the sister silent? What was going on in that marriage? Could the family have done something to prevent it?

“There was no physical violence before the murder. The first aggression was the last”, he says. “In the months that followed, I found answers to all my questions. We could have saved Michal. She died for nothing. Her murder is standard, it’s not special,” she says.

After the crime, Lili discovered that male friends had been deleted from her sister’s social networks. When she told one of the investigators, she heard that this phenomenon was common in cases of femicide: the man accesses his partner’s cell phone and breaks his contacts. “That is, there is a pattern, and you can identify and give a warning”, she says.

That’s what developed one of the projects in the NGO’s programming marathon. The solution is an application that tells the user if someone is accessing their cell phone. If the type of touch on the screen deviates from the device’s owner’s standard, the device warns. It is possible to know if another person entered the cell phone during the night and deleted emails, for example.

The panic button application, another event initiative, is for an emergency situation. Through a security word, the device calls predetermined contacts and activates the camera and microphone.

Another example is an app to report cases of violence without reporting to the police immediately. When three victims report against the same perpetrator, the app suggests they connect to go to the police station together.

“After my sister died, there were six complaints against him, but before there were none. Because when these women manage to get rid of the relationship, they don’t want to go to the police, they want to close the story”, he says.

These patterns of gender violence, according to Lili, are international. The victim’s language repeats itself; that of the aggressor, too. A large number of murders happen when the woman tries to break up with the aggressor — your sister’s case. Abrupt changes, such as a new home or the birth of a baby, are crisis points, and aggression peaks around holidays and festivals.

Partner profiles are also similar. There are those who are known to be violent, who attack and shout at the woman in public, for example, and there are the silent ones, like her sister’s ex-partner. Everyone adored him for his thoughtful ways, and he seemed to like the same things Michal did.

At home, however, he was controlling.

“This guy wants to know at all times who the woman is talking to, what she’s wearing, where she is. It’s like having the KGB on your shoulder. He’s addicted to controlling his partner,” says Lili. “For many women, it’s hard to talk about harassment. You’re ashamed of what your body has been through. The same goes for women who have an abusive partner.”

So far, more than 400 solutions have been presented in the three editions of the hackathon. At the end of each event, the top ten ideas receive an acceleration from Google to give continuity to the projects.

At the end of November, Lili came to Brazil and met with technology companies in the country, such as Meta, Google, Uber and Microsoft. She also met Brazilian startups and spoke about their history in the Senate.

“Domestic violence and feminicide are the only fields with a life-and-death situation that cannot be prevented,” he said in the plenary of the House. “Why only in this case are the tools the same for so long?”

In the interview with the newspaper, she said she was impressed with the management of security data in Brazil, which manages to identify the number of feminicides by region. And she said that the objective of her project is to eliminate this type of crime.

“Michal fought for her life and died because she was a woman. We could see her effort. After the murder, the lamp in the room was broken, the door was broken in two. There was skin under her fingernails”, she says. “My dream is, in the future, to sit on a beach with my niece and tell her that one day there was this phenomenon called femicide, and that her mother was a victim of it. She fought until the end to survive, we continued her battle and we won.”