A digital companion for abuse survivors

It’s estimated that around one-third of women worldwide experience domestic violence. The true number is likely higher because most victims don’t report it. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, the problem has only grown worse. 

The United Nations defines domestic violence as “a pattern of behaviour in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” It doesn’t only affect women and isn’t only physical violence—the abuse can be emotional, economic, psychological, or sexual. Fewer than 40% of victims seek help and less than 10% go to the police.  

“You’ve got to imagine that someone who’s a victim of domestic abuse, it’s coming from someone they probably trust the most in the world—maybe the father or mother of their children, maybe the love of their lives,” says Rhiana Spring, founder of Spring Action-Compassion-Technology, also known as Spring ACT. “Admitting that to yourself is really hard, let alone to a friend or someone else.” 

Since December 2021, Spring ACT has provided a safe, anonymous way for victims to learn about the signs of abuse, gather information and evidence, and plan their escape.  

It’s a chatbot named Sophia, and it won first prize in the general category at the 2023 Social Innovation Tournament of the European Investment Bank Institute. The tournament recognises startups that are changing the world for the better—socially, economically, or ethically. 

Sophia is available 24/7 and in every country in the world. Simply type sophia.chat into a smartphone or computer browser and start chatting directly. Using the information on the webpage, you can also use WhatsApp, Telegram, or Viber. A video chat option is available for users with low literacy.  

The automated chatbot explains that it can help in three ways: providing information on available support, chatting about relationships, and storing potential evidence. A sentence that Sophia writes is, for example, “If you’re feeling alone,” Sophia writes, “know that there are many people out there ready and waiting to help you.” 

 “Sophia guides you to learn what constitutes a healthy relationship, what are signs of abuse, what can you do if you want to escape,” Rhiana explains. “The main aim is to guide the person to a support service, to a human that is there to help them. It lowers the threshold to do so.” 

The chatbot helps people collect evidence, such as photos of bruises or screenshots of abusive messages, and store it on an innovative digital safe. The safe is encrypted and accessed via an image within which Sophia hides a password using steganography.  

“The password needs to be extremely secure, because it’s hosting the most sensitive data of potential evidence, police records, health records,” Rhiana says. “You can’t write down your password or use a password manager, because you need to hide from the person that might be living with you.”  

As soon as you close the window, Sophia should rewrite your browser history and replaces the page with an untraceable decoy website. 

Rhiana created her first business at age 17 in her native Switzerland, doing computer programming part-time. After studying law in the United Kingdom, she worked as an international human rights expert in numerous countries.  

She had the idea for Spring ACT in Senegal in 2017, when a family of refugees visited her United Nations office, looking for help to enrol a child in school. Rhiana recalls, “Talking to the right person in my network, we managed to find three solutions in a weekend and enrol her in school within a month. Just by knowing the right institutions to ask and connecting them with the refugee family.” 

She realised that technology could help match people and organisations. “People in vulnerable situations often know what they need,” she says. “They just may not know where to find it.”  

When the pandemic hit, and domestic violence rose drastically, she decided to focus the technology on the needs of those victims. “That just hit a nerve in society, and since then we’ve been running after the demand, basically.” 

It’s difficult to measure the chatbot’s impact, since users are anonymous. Spring ACT knows that, since late 2021, people from 143 countries have visited sophia.chat, and more than 30 000 of them have chatted with Sophia. 

Spring ACT consists of a core team and some 80 volunteers, all working from home. Domestic abuse survivors are represented at every level of the organisation, ensuring that Sophia responds properly to victims’ needs.  

While the chatbot is available everywhere — providing practical advice, the digital safe, and the contact information of national organisations — the company has “launched” it in four countries, meaning it provides more specific local information in these locations. 

Expanding this service and offering precise information in every country is an enormous task, not to mention keeping it up to date. Spring ACT will never charge survivors to use its service, but funding and capacity are serious issues. Rhiana says the EIB award was a lifesaver, and she is using the prize money, which represents half the company’s annual budget, to build the team and capacity. 

At the same time, Spring ACT is building additional tools. The next one, “Comeback CatZ,” aims to give people with imposter syndrome more confidence and tackles everyday sexism through witty comebacks. Geared to a different audience, it will include some free services and then charge for other features, and subscriptions will help support survivors of domestic violence.   

With each tool it creates, Spring ACT uses technology to empower individuals and help eliminate social injustices. When the company had to come up with its own name, “ACT” was an obvious choice. Company members then suggested “Spring,” but Rhiana resisted using her surname, pointing out that “I have a team, it’s not just me.” Finally, she recalls, “My mom said, ‘Rhiana, you don’t own the season.’ And that is why we used spring—it’s the season of new beginnings. You might be in a hard situation, but there is hope. Break through that difficult time, that icy ground, and the sun is there, and you can grow.”