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Callisto reverses decision to delete account data following user concerns

By Esha Dhawan on April 17, 2020

Callisto Campus, a tool available for Stanford students to document and report sexual and relationship violence, will be discontinued on June 30 and replaced with another version of the program.

Callisto is a third-party online platform that allows students to document and time stamp experiences with unwanted sexual conduct. If a student is not ready to submit a report to the University, their report is saved in the system, with the option for it to be submitted later.

“One of the unique features about Callisto was the ability to have your report be submitted to the Title IX office in the event that the perpetrator that you had listed also matched the perpetrator another survivor listed,” wrote former ASSU President Shanta Katipamula ’19 M.S. ’20 in an email to The Daily. While chair of the Undergraduate Senate, Katipamula also authored the bill proposing the three-year pilot of Callisto in 2016.

While Callisto Campus will be discontinued, this year Callisto will launch a new product that connects victims of sexual misconduct to attorneys who help them understand actions they can take, according to the Callisto website. Stanford students will have free access to this platform, but the University is still deciding whether to initiate a new partnership with Callisto, according to ASSU Co-Director of Sexual Violence Prevention Krithika Iyer ’21.

“We are investigating what a potential partnership would entail, and whether a new Stanford-Callisto partnership would be beneficial for survivors,” Iyer wrote. “We will be seeking input from the student community.”
“Callisto is transitioning some of its services over the summer and it will no longer be based on a partnership model with individual schools,” wrote Senior Associate Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Access Lauren Schoenthaler in a statement to The Daily.

An update on the Callisto Campus website initially read that the service would be replaced with a new version of Callisto and that all account data would be deleted, quickly leading some to raise concerns.

“This would undermine the ability of the platform to identify repeat perpetrators on campus,” Iyer wrote.
Stanford Law professor Michele Dauber was one of the individuals who reached out to Callisto to share her concerns. One of her concerns was Callisto’s inability to inform users that their data would be deleted.

“Because there are no records kept of who the users are, Callisto doesn’t stay in contact with their end-users,” Dauber said. “In other words, if you were someone who had made such a report, you wouldn’t get an email from Callisto saying, ‘we’re changing our business model.’”

She spoke to the trauma that this could create for survivors who had placed their trust in the platform.

“They had trusted this entity because it was created by survivors and then found that all of their information had been deleted when they didn’t know it,” she said.

Callisto has since reversed its decision to delete the data.

“With respect to the feedback we have received from our partners and the extraordinary challenges posed by COVID-19, we are not deleting this data,” wrote interim Callisto CEO Tina Robilotto in an email to The Daily. “We will maintain the record data even after Callisto Campus is decommissioned and the new product is launched to our partner campuses.”

“While I understand that they’ve now understood the error of this decision and are no longer going to be deleting records, the initial decision to do so was poorly communicated and breached the trust survivors had placed in their system,” wrote Katipamula.

Dauber complimented Callisto’s “willingness to admit a mistake and reverse it.”

Schoenthaler said that Callisto had informed the University on Thursday morning that it no longer had plans to delete the records, calling it “great news.”

Dauber urged students to download reports they had made to Callisto to ensure they are preserved, and Iyer made a similar recommendation.

“While Callisto has committed to not deleting any records, the ASSU recommends that students download their report if they want to be absolutely sure that they retain a permanent copy,” Iyer said.

Despite Callisto Campus’s unique function, Iyer told The Daily that the platform has not been sufficiently advertised to students and that she hopes to increase awareness about it in following years.

“Data from the AAU survey indicate that only 9% of Stanford students are aware that Callisto Campus is an available resource,” she said. Iyer also reported efforts to ensure that Callisto is included in New Student Orientation information sessions next fall.

Dauber called the episode a “cautionary tale” about Silicon Valley’s tendency to rely on technology to solve problems.

“I think Callisto came from the best of intentions but also was riding that wave of easy assumptions about technical fixes for a very hard social problem,” she said. “There is no shortcut, in my opinion, to fixing the problem of campus sexual assault.”

This article has been updated to include a clarification from Iyer on the tool to be included in New Student Orientation information sessions.

Contact Esha Dhawan at edhawan ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

Under Title IX, colleges have an obligation to address sexual assault on campus.

Colleges have a corresponding obligation to treat all students fairly. Unfortunately, many colleges have created secret sex tribunals that stack the deck against accused students in order to increase discipline rates.

The tribunals often dispense with the presumption of innocence; deny students the right to see the specific charges or evidence against them; and deny accused students the opportunity to present evidence that might demonstrate consent, such as text messages.

Such procedures violate basic standards of fairness and have led to many miscarriages of justice.

Hundreds of students have successfully sued their colleges for unfair treatment.

But few colleges have altered their policies in response to such rulings.

It’s time for the Department of Education to issue regulations requiring schools to adopt fair and unbiased procedures.

Because without due process, there can be no justice.

Damning conclusions in spite of many caveats

A week after USA Today published a four-part series on student athletes who transfer freely between NCAA schools despite sexual misconduct claims, a university president-turned-lawmaker threatened to cut off the federal spigot to schools that don’t properly address violence.

The scrutiny from the media and Capitol Hill got the attention of the NCAA, which had formerly resisted government pressure. Now it claims to be “actively working” with Congress “to modernize our rules.”

Before we applaud this rush toward supposed accountability for the NCAA and its members, however, we must carefully vet the assertions in the “Predator Pipeline” series by USA Today’s investigative team. Has it actually documented a predator pipeline with NCAA involvement that requires congressional intervention?

The NCAA regulates more than 480,000 student athletes from 1,268 North American institutions. It is being accused of complicity in the pipeline, at the very least.

Freshman Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration official and University of Miami president, introduced the Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics Act in December.

The bill creates a congressional commission to oversee college sports, and review how federal funding is spent on related programs. While HR-5528 is silent on the commission’s authority, Shalala herself implied that federal funding may be at stake.

“Our higher education institutions receive a substantial amount of federal student support funding,” Shalala told Florida Daily when she introduced the bill. “There is little oversight, and as a result, we have little insight into how the funding is being spent and if the students’ best interests are being prioritized. This commission would fill that gap.”

The USA Today investigation found that since 2014, at least 28 current and former athletes had transferred and continued to play sports despite being administratively disciplined for a sexual offense. One article’s subtitle says the NCAA “looks other way as athletes punished for sex offenses play on.”

MORE: Michigan State settles with Keith Mumphery after ruining his NFL career

Of more than 1,100 American colleges with NCAA programs, the 226 with teams competing at a  Division I level were surveyed. Just 35 provided data on sexual violence, of which one was excluded, representing about 15 percent of surveyed colleges and about 3 percent of the total.

The small size of the sampling is a problem. For one thing, conclusions based on a small sampling of a large population must be random to be credible. Otherwise, the data could reflect selection bias on the part of USA Today or the colleges themselves.

The responding colleges reported 531 cases of student sexual misconduct, 47 of which were NCAA athletes—all male. Questions arise again. Does this rate reflect the increased scrutiny athletes may receive? If a student is part of a another group that overlaps with athletes, which group is used?

In fairness, USA Today admits its data are “not necessarily representative.” It also acknowledges that some surveys appeared to report the same offender multiple times, and it is impossible for a reader to assess how effectively the duplicates were filtered out.

Despite advancing many caveats, however, USA Today goes on to draw damning conclusions. One concerns the non-responding colleges. “That’s 191 schools,” an article in the series states, “that shielded the identities of alleged abusers at the expense of women’s safety and the public’s right to know.”

There could be many reasons for a non-response, however. The college might resent the deadline imposed or the cost of assembling extensive data; USA Today admits a reluctance to pay some requested fees. The college could doubt the motives of the news organization. Or, perhaps, it felt constrained by state privacy laws or the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Definitional problems also exist. Universities use terms both vaguely and differently. Terms like “sexual misconduct” are elastic and stretch to cover everything from rape to a lover’s quarrel. One defense attorney told me that in half of her cases, there wasn’t any actual sex but allegations such as “he kissed me without permission.”

MORE: Liberty U expelled football player for rape hours before he was cleared

A congressional review of offenses is problematic as well, because it is not likely to include a review of the procedures used to adjudicate a case.

For years, sexual misconduct hearings have been defined by the so-called Dear Colleague letter to colleges from the Obama administration in April 2011. It admonished colleges flatly to believe an accuser and to refuse due process rights, such as cross-examination or the presence of a lawyer, to an accused student.

The neglect of due process continues to this day, and the problem of wrongful convictions that result is well documented. Some “convictions” have been overturned in the court system. Jack Montague (below), former captain of the Yale University basketball team, is an example.

A great tension also exists between USA Today’s statement of methodology and the four articles. The statement concludes with a call for “further investigation and analysis,” which is reasonable.

But the articles present lurid details of rape and express rage at specific athletes, and one of those articles may have put pressure on Rep. Shalala to file her bill.

“NCAA Board of Governors to review policies regarding sexual assault amid congressional pressure on ‘predator pipeline’,” for example, features a University of Miami football player “accused of gang rape” in 2014, when Shalala was president.

Alex Figueroa was expelled, and he later “accepted a deferred prosecution agreement for felony sexual battery with multiple perpetrators.” By failing to explain “deferred prosecution,” which means the system determined not to prosecute, USA Today implies that Figueroa was criminally disciplined.

Even though deferred prosecution cannot be conflated with guilt, the article uses Figueroa to illustrate the predator pipeline: He transferred to another NCAA college that independently assessed him as “an exemplary student-athlete.”

The need to address sexual violence will not go away, nor should it. But it must be approached with facts, not sensationalism, and with fairness to both the accuser and the accused. USA Today has not successfully documented a predator pipeline, and its articles should not be the basis of law.

Wendy McElroy is the author/editor of five books on individualist feminism, and several others on political topics. Her most recent book is “The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations.” McElroy has written hundreds of articles that have appeared in such wide-raging publications as Penthouse, The Hill, and bitcoin.com.