Most of the digital tools survivors are handed were built for someone else — investigators, prosecutors, institutions. They ask survivors to translate their experience into a form the system can read, and they rarely give anything back.
Survivor-centered technology starts from the opposite premise: the survivor is the user, the owner of the record, and the one who decides what happens next.
What that looks like in practice
- The survivor controls the record from the first keystroke.
- Disclosure is opt-in, granular, and reversible wherever possible.
- The tool works even if the survivor never reports — usefulness is not contingent on engaging the system.
- Trauma-informed defaults: no surprise prompts, no dark patterns, no "are you sure" guilt loops.
Why this matters now
AI is reshaping both the harms survivors face and the tools available to respond. We can either rebuild the same institutional logic on faster infrastructure, or we can use this moment to put something genuinely different in survivors' hands.
We're choosing the second.
TechnologySurvivor-centered design