Building a Digital Ecosystem to Support Survivors and Reduce Gender-Based Violence

What if the support students need was built into an app they use every day?

That question is guiding a multi-year initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, led by Dr. Rachel Garthe, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, in collaboration with the Center for Social & Behavioral Science along with other campus units and Vanderbilt University. This project, which grew out of a CSBS Small Grant and is supported by funding from the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice through its Research and Evaluation program, is centered on designing, implementing, and evaluating a technological intervention embedded within the Illinois app. The goal is to create more accessible, discreet, and student-centered pathways to support and services for survivors of gender-based violence.

Gender-based violence includes experiences such as unwanted sexual contact, unwanted sexual attention, stalking in person or online, rape, and emotional or physical abuse by a partner. These experiences are widespread on college campuses, yet only about 15% of students engage with formal campus resources, many citing they do not know where to seek help or what to expect when they report.

Project Goal and Objectives

This project is both a research study and a campus innovation effort. Its goal is to evaluate how embedding gender-based violence resources within an existing digital ecosystem, the Illinois app, can improve student help seeking and access to support services.

The objective of the grant is to progressively design and develop gender-based violence (GBV) related sections within the Illinois app and:

From Student Insight to Campus Collaboration

Over the past three years, the research team has worked closely with students to understand barriers to seeking help. Through focus groups and interviews, students consistently identified challenges including limited awareness of available resources, concerns about privacy, and uncertainty about reporting pathways.

In response, the team developed new features within the Illinois app that allow students to safely explore support options, access tailored resources, and better understand what happens when they seek help. By embedding these tools within an existing platform that students already use, the project reduces friction and removes the need for separate standalone applications.

A Forum to Shape What Comes Next

The Campus Preview and Partnership Forum marked a key moment in the project, bringing together campus and community partners who have contributed to design, implementation, and support systems to date. Participants were given a briefing of the findings from the formative research shaping the app features selected, provided visualizations of the new gender-based violence tools that approximately 2,500 students currently have access to, and details regarding next steps.

The forum closed with a facilitated reflection activity, inviting partners to identify priorities for promoting the upcoming campus wide rollout, with emphasis on alignment with existing campus and community support structures. Discussions reinforced that effective help seeking systems require both strong technological design and coordinated institutional partnerships.

From Pilot to Campus Wide Impact

While the randomized controlled trial will conclude in May, the research team is eliciting student feedback from the pilot to inform refinements to the app features and helping better understand how the integrated digital tools influence awareness, decision making, and help seeking behaviors.

These insights, along with input gathered during the forum, will guide the next stage of development as the project moves toward a full campus wide launch in Fall 2026. The research team is actively pursuing funding to support large scale evaluation of impact across the university, including changes in resource awareness, service utilization, and reporting behaviors.

The Campus Preview and Partnership Forum highlighted the importance of sustained collaboration across campus and community partners. By integrating student voice, institutional expertise, and digital innovation, the project aims to strengthen pathways to support and ensure more students can access help when they need it the most.