In 2014, Dr. Penny Smith created Keys to Coping, an online sexual assault reporting tool, hoping to transform the way colleges and universities handle reports of sexual assault, domestic violence and stalking on their campuses.
The web-based tool is newly modified to increase victim support for students, bystander intervention training and risk mitigation for institutions, even as the Department of Education debates potential rollbacks to Obama-era Title IX policies regarding reporting and investigating sexual assaults on campus.
Smith, president and CEO of Alegria Technologies and a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, made it her mission to break the silence surrounding sexual assaults on college campuses and universities.
The former higher education administrator says she realized that colleges were scrambling for prevention options, rather than reporting options. After speaking to administrators at nearly 60 institutions, Smith says she realized schools were concerned that a technology tool like Keys to Coping would increase the number of reports, “thereby making them appear to not be safe,” she says.
The doubts almost forced Smith to “shut down the whole company,” she adds. However, she attempted to shift the paradigm from “‘We need to break the silence’ to ‘It’s OK to know … and the more you know, the more [assaults] you can prevent.’”
In the four schools that have implemented the Keys to Coping tool — Central State University, Kentucky State University, Delta State University and Lincoln University — student feedback shows that the reporting tool is making a difference.
At Central State, the tool’s pilot site, 60 percent of students responded that Keys to Coping changed their views for the better regarding how the administration handles campus sexual assault prevention and intervention, Smith says.
