Orbit
Orbit is a service that enable people to report hate crimes against the LGBTIQ Community through a new channel, a channel that they can trust and which don’t make them ashamed or scared of report. This is very important because right now in Europe only 10% of this type of hate crimes aggression are reported, because citizens don't trust have trust in authorities and are embarrassed to ask for help.
Background
Regarding the topic of European democracy, values and rights, one of the emerging topics is on LGBTQI+ equality: the EU cannot strive for a union of equality (Gender Equality Strategy, 2021, "Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025" section) when violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual preference and gender identification persists.
In the EU, around 7% of the population self-identifies as part of the LGBTQI+ community, with an estimated total of 31,3m individuals.
During 2020, approximately 272 anti-LGBTQI+ hate crimes (HC) descriptive incidents and 3028 statistical incidents were officially reported across the EU. However, these figures do not necessarily reflect the actual state of the Union. Anti-LGBTQI+ HC are under-reported, with one survey finding that only 1 out of every 10 hate incidents are reported to authorities, making it challenging to capture the difference between actual prevalence and disclosed hate incidents.
This lack of reporting is due mainly to a lack of trust within individuals and institutions. -Only 14 out of 27 EU member states recognize the right of no discrimination on the basis of sexual preference and/or gender identity in all areas of life, with 7 explicitly prohibiting transphobic hate crimes, and only 5 including gender expression. There is also a consistent lack of quantity of reports and quality of data in states where anti-LGBTQI+ hate incidents are not recognized as hate crimes. However, even in countries where it is recognized, there is still a data gap related to the quantity, quality, compatibility and interoperability of hate crime data recording and collection, which cannot be traced through the criminal justice system and process, and prevents reports from becoming actionable.
In addition, from consulting stakeholders and people previously involved in a HC, it emerges that lack of reporting and the consequential data gap relates to personal barriers, such as proximity to the abuser, effort invested in reporting and difficulty moving forward without adequate and comprehensive social support; and systemic barriers, such as lack of trust in institutions, specifically law enforcement and justice systems, which amplifies the negative feedback issue of amount and quality of reporting and deters exposed individuals from reporting, placing the burden of reporting on victims.
When you face a discrimination, you want to pursue justice, the problem now is how can you, when there are all these barriers, this is why we decided to address this problem.
Addressing under reporting
According to the EU Commission High Level Group (HLG) on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance, hate crime reporting, identification and recording is the first step in ensuring that offences are investigated and, where necessary, prosecuted and sanctioned. The limited amount of reports, and the low quality of collected incident information limits the ability to act on the situation as there is no comparable, reliable data that can be harnessed for change.
We understood that in order to increase the number of reporting, enabling alternative mechanisms and third-party reporting is key. Services that enable a different path for effective individual and crowdsourced anti-LGBTQI+ hate crime reporting, built upon a network of allies and witnesses can become a medium for exchanging HQ open data without direct institutional involvement in a safe and anonymous way. This would enable witnesses and people involved in a hate crime within the EU to make an incident report in more convenient ways: by enabling a digital, online platform in EU states that prosecute hate crimes, and by repurposing existing and widespread infrastructure that has been adopted, such as ATMs in countries where they are not.
Field research
After strengthening our research about hate crimes against the LGBTIQ+ community, and the confirmed need to enable and diversify third party reporting of hate-crime related incidents during the previous phase, we integrated our individual findings to inform and enrich our concept in order to move forward into the co-design phase.
We decided to conduct 2 co-design sessions to:
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Validate the physical touch point that can be used to report
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Understanding how people have or would respond in scenarios relating to hate crimes
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Understand how members of the LGBT community would interact and respond to the current service concept
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Understand a witness’ capacity to remember information
Co-design activities
Touch point selection: we used the map of a neighbourhood in milan in which different locations, common in every neighborhoods, were highlighted (like gas stations, ATM machines, restaurants, metro stations, supermarkets etc). The participants are presented several scenarios were a hate crime happen, both from a victim and witness point of view, and we invited to discuss how they would react if they were involved, would they ignore the situation? Would they ask for help to a local business? Would they call the police? Would they go to the closest metro station?
ATM critique: we introduced the idea of using an ATM machine to ask for help or report a crime. We then split the group in half and have them play devils advocate, with one half defending and one against.
Individual action description: Using timers and questionaire sheets, the particiants are asked to visually analyse an image of a scenario for 30 seconds and then recall all the information which they absorbed. This activity was selected to help us understand the threshold of an average person’s ability to recall meaningful information. Obviously, this was an incredibly bias perspective as the shock and trauma related to witnessing or being apart of an attack is absent. However, it can still provide meaningful insights about what we are generally drawn towards remembering. This activity later informed the content and wording of our witness questions.
Collective criteria: this activity can be considered the part 2 the previous one. Once everyone has completed their form, we prompt them to move towards the larger common board. Here we instructed them to draw upon the information they all collected and create a report with as much information as they can remember. In this way we were able to observe how multiple reports could interact with each other to fill in the gaps, validating knowledge and inspire recollections from the scene.
This acitivity was used to validate the need for collective intelligence/collaboration on crime reporting, thus our decision to engage witnesses/bystanders through this service.
Insights Co-design
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Working with other people to build a report bring better results, witnesses are therefore fundamental to increase the details of an aggression and make it easier to pursue justice.
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Participants mostly appreciated the idea of using ATM machines, especially because it allows them to remain anonymous, they would be scared to be traced using their cell phones, especially victims who live in countries which don't recognize hate crimes against the LGBTIQ Community.
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Witnesses also would prefer to use the ATM machines to make sure to be anonymous, most of them would engage in the reporting but they would prefer to not engage further (for example they would avoid an interview with a police officer or to testify at a trial).
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Most of the participants stated if they were victim of a hate crime in a country where this kind of crime is recognized by the government they would probably used their phone to report the crime: it makes them less ashamed than go phisically to the police station right after the crime happened and furthermore they would need anyway to share their personal data to actually pursue justice.
Our solution
To adress all the issues listed above and taking into account the insights identified during the co - design sessions, we created Orbit. Orbit can really facilitate the process of reporting. In the countries where hate crimes are legally recognized, individuals can quickly report online, from the comfort of their homes, without having to face the stress and the fear of going to the police station. Their reports, in fact, are forwarded to the police and all the data collected are anonymously showed on an open source digital platform, which aims to show a clear picture of the current situation. On this platform numerous support services are available to help people who suffer a hate crime.
In the 14 countries where, shamefully, hate crimes against the LGBT Community are still not recognized from the institutions, Orbit goal is to collect trustable data to show the severity of the problem and to hopefully achieve a change of policy. In these countries the barriers are even more and to normalize the act of report and make individuals more confident in the anonymity of the process, Orbit employs existing touchpoint, trustable and available everywhere, ATM machines. For Obit it’s very important that not only victims, but also witnesses report, the responsibility needs to be shared to create a safer community for everyone with a very low individual effort.
Video
I created this video, using After Effects, to better summarize how Orbit works and the differences between the countries which recognize these type of crimes and the ones which don't.
Conclusions
If we really want to reach a Union of equality some major changes need to be done:
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The EU should equalize across all the Member states the definition of what constitutes an anti-LGBT hate crime to include hate speech, as well as multifactorial bias.
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The EU should ensure proper recognition and treatment of HC victims in line with the Victims’ Rights Directive during and after HC incident reporting.
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Furthermore, it should promote the usage of inclusive language and terminology, by transitioning from a gender-neutral to a language that is gender-sensitive and non-heteronormative
Project overview
Academic Project: Politecnico di Milano - Master degree
Duration: 6 months
Design Team: Nina Zanarelli, Bria Versace, Mishell Orta