PEACE Protecting Educating Advocating Celebrating Empowering

Logo

Inspiration

Texas has a fairly new and very progressive law that is 2.5 years old called David's Law. It was passed to protect students from cyberbullying. David was a 16-year-old who took his own life after he was cyberbullied, called a monkey, and made fun of on social media by students at his school. After he transferred to another school and left social media, students texted him images of ongoing social media posts making fun of him. His mother got the Texas legislature to pass David's Law and his family set up David's Legacy Foundation. Aside from requiring schools to investigate cyberbullying and report to the parents of the victims and bullies, David's Law allows victims to obtain court injunctions against the cyberbullies to force them to stop. It also criminalizes cyberbullying that threatens bodily harm. David's Legacy Foundation has a website that allows students and parents to report cyberbullying and they hook up families with volunteer lawyers who can issue cease-and-desist letters to the cyberbully and his parents. However, their website is also educational and it is difficult to find the forms that allow someone to request legal help. On its website, David's Legacy Foundation uses the acronym PEACE: Protecting, Educating, Advocating, Celebrating, Empowering. We adopted that name for our app bc it is positive and comforting and can help bring peace to students who are being cyberbullied and do not know how to get help or to whom to report what is happening. The name also links the app to the Foundation which might work well if they agree to accept and process the data gathered through the app.

What it does

The idea behind the mobile app we developed is to make it as easy as possible for students or anyone over 13 years old to report cyberbullying incidents and seek help. The information gathered will be sent to David's Legacy Foundation by email for intake and processing. For serious cases where the person using the app indicates that he is thinking of hurting himself or is being threatened with bodily harm, the information would be sent not only to David's Legacy Foundation but also to local and state law enforcement such as the local police, the sheriff's office, the El Paso County Attorney's Office (or whichever County Attorney's Office is in the region where the harm occurred), and the local District Attorney's Office. David's Law carries criminal penalties for the most severe cases that threaten bodily harm through cyberbullying. The El Paso County Attorney's Office recently prosecuted a female student in El Paso who released, via Airdrop, nude photos of another female student who formerly dated the same boy that the cyberbully female was dating at the time she released the photos. This mobile app wil make it easy for victims and their parents or anyone who is a witness to report cyberbullying, explain the level of severity, upload images of the cyberbullying texts, and seek legal assistance from the volunteer lawyers at David's Legacy Foundation. At the moment, David's Legacy Foundation does not have its own mobile app - just a website with many pages under which one must navigate to Contact Us and find the right form to request legal assistance - but is seeking a partnership with another mobile app that is not specifically geared for this purpose. Of the existing mobile apps on cyberbullying, none fits the profile of the app we developed because, for two of them, they require school officials to login and register to serve as the sole recipients of the information. Another mobile app is designed for parents to monitor what their children do on their cell phones. None of the six leading apps allows anyone over 13 to report to David's Legacy Foundation and, for severe cases, directly to law enforcement officers and prosecutors.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to develop our mobile application. In order to corporately work and keep versions, we have used GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

We could not get immediate confirmation from David's Legacy Foundation that they would welcome receipt of the data gathered by the app. They have an email address at info@davidslegacy.org but we would like them to confirm that we could send info from the app to this address. We contacted an Assistant District Attorney to see if his office has a way to receive this information by email but we have not heard back. We did not have time to contact the local police department or sheriff's office to see if they have an email address to which the data could be sent and processed. We would need time to contact all of the County Attorney's in Texas (since they prosecute David's Law) to seek similar information, e.g. an email address, to which the data for serious and severe incidents could be reported. We would need to see if there is a statewide office that could receive and process such data. If the data does not have willing recipients to review it and process it, then the app would lose credibility. We would need time to develop these partnerships, perhaps starting with one or two recipients like David's Legacy Foundation which already receives hundreds of inquiries through its website and presentations but may not be equipped to deal with thousands of reports from a mobile app. Another challenge was to build the app with our limited technological experience in such a way that it could capture data and send it to an email address, in such a short time frame. Another challenge was that we initially thought the app could be used by all ages in elementary school and middle school but there is a federal law called COPPA that prohibits gathering personal data, such as names and addresses and numbers, from children under 13 without notifying their parents and getting their consent. That is why Facebook forbids users under 13. So, we are posting a note that children under 13 cannot use the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a prototype together. We developed a nice logo. We figured out some legal issues. We mapped out what we would need to do in the future to make it functional. We worked well together in voting on the format, the logo, the name. We are proud that it is for a good cause and there is a chance that it could actually be used by David's Legacy Foundation. We are in talks with them since one of our members is a volunteer with them already. THis could help students in El Paso and Texas in a specific and personal way to get help. It could serve as an immediate lifeline using tools at their disposal. It could have a huge impact if we can find willing partners to accept the data.

What we learned

We learned how to copy and paste code to create forms to receive data. We learned about COPPA that makes it difficult to collect information from kids under 13 so we decided to limit the app to usage by people who are 13 or older. We learned that a great logo can be created by a skilled and creative designer in less than an hour.

What's next for PEACE

We want to continue with the app to perfect it and see if we can get a partner such as David's Legacy Foundation to receive the data so we can make it operational. If the foundation agrees, then we could finish the app and release it for use. We have confidence in the Foundation's ability to intelligently process the data. We would need to find ways to screen out fake complaints by pranksters.