“The Safest Woman Alive” A Reflection on Interpersonal Safety Technologies for Gendered Violence Protection

We tell a story of a woman getting ready to go for a walk, using a plethora of personal safety technologies designed and reported on by HCI researchers to ensure her own safety against public gendered violence (GV). To reflect on this approach, we elicit the Four Domains of Power, highlighting HCI’s over-engagement with interpersonal safety technologies when seeking to intervene in GV. In later parts of the paper, we discuss two main contributions for HCI: (1) The Complexities of Designing for GV as an Interpersonal Problem and (2) Complexities of Designing for Normative Understandings of GV to highlight the potential harm in employing interpersonal technological solutions to socio-political issues. Coming back to the four domains of power, we ultimately argue that HCI-researchers and designers can use the framework to analyze their technological interventions to address GV in more nuanced ways as to not re-produce shortsighted, solutionist, or victim-blaming technologies.