Smart Sophia - The Chatbot

What’s the issue at hand?

Domestic violence is a deadly pandemic that affects almost 1 in 3 women and up to 1 in 7 men worldwide. This means anyone reading this text is guaranteed to have more than one friend who has suffered or is suffering from an abusive relationship. From the outside the solution might seem simple: Leave the abuser. The reality, however, is far from that.
Most people in abusive relationships cannot or are too scared to leave. Their partner’s manipulation and/or threats to harm them or their children or pets are often as big of a barrier to freedom as physical prison walls. Survivors often do not know where to turn, and, finding that they lack tangible evidence of the abuse, remain in a vulnerable situation, even once they have left. Amongst other reasons, this is why a large majority of the survivors (60%) in Switzerland, for instance, never seek help; of those who seek help, only a tiny fraction (20%) go to the police. To make things worse, during the Covid pandemic’s lockdown, the usual avenues of seeking help suddenly became inaccessible, as the survivors became trapped at home with the abuser. To deal with this pandemic of domestic violence, we need for a tool that (1) can reach survivors when they are trapped at home, wherever they are; (2) lowers the threshold for seeking help; (3) empowers survivors to take action, ensuring they stand the best chance of leaving for good. We need to give survivors of domestic violence back the future they deserve.