Abstract:
Domestic violence can involve men to women, men to
children, women to children and sometimes women to men.
Domestic violence in Kenya is mostly prevalent in middle-income
and lower-income levels of the society. In this paper, a prototype
system is implemented to administer and manage a national
domestic violence call center. This is a GIS-based call center
system supporting distress calls by: (i) automatically identifying
callers’ locations, (ii) Quickly assessing accurate spatial
information from its database about nearby advocate resources and
reporting back to the caller, the identified advocate, and (iii)
publishing maps in Keyhole Markup Language for viewing in
software supporting open standards such as Google Earth. The
system was validated using sample data collected from Juja
location. This prototype shows promise of being able to offer rapid
and timely responses to domestic violence (and other) distress
requests utilizing geospatially enabled technologies.
