Planned — phase 5 Research ethics review required
Second Injury Index
The abuse is one injury. How the institution responded can become a second one. The first is hard to measure. The second is not — and almost nobody measures it.
What it measures
Six things, asked of the person who went through the process, about the quality of the response rather than its outcome.
- Were your rights and the available services explained to you?
- Was the status of your case communicated clearly, and did you know who to ask?
- Were your privacy and safety needs addressed?
- Were you asked to repeat traumatic material more times than necessary?
- Were referrals made, and were they timely?
- Were you treated with dignity?
Notice what is absent: whether anyone was charged, whether the account was believed, and whether the outcome was favourable. An institution can respond well to a case that goes nowhere, and appallingly to one that ends in conviction.
What it is not
- Not a public accusation database. No individual is named, ever.
- Not a complaints service. It cannot resolve your case, and we will say so before you start.
- Not a league table of shame. The purpose is institutional improvement, published responsibly.
- Not open for participation yet. It will not collect a single response before research ethics and privacy review are complete and published.
Why this is deliberately last
Measuring institutional response means collecting information from people at their most vulnerable, about organisations with lawyers. Getting the ethics, the anonymisation, the consent model and the publication policy right is slow work, and doing it badly would expose the very people the index exists to serve.
If you are a researcher, ethicist, statistician or privacy specialist and this is your field, we would like to talk to you.