PLENA Personal Safety Attestation
Evidence the victim controls, that survives the abuser, the employer, and the institutional response. For intimate partner violence, workplace harassment, police encounters, stalking, and any pattern of harm where contemporaneous victim-controlled documentation is the difference between a credible case and unsupported testimony.
Opening problem
Roughly one in four women and one in nine men in the United States experience severe intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that one in three women experience physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. Workplace sexual harassment affects between forty and eighty percent of women across most surveyed populations, with substantial under-reporting. Police-encounter harm — from racial profiling through excessive force — is concentrated in specific populations across most countries with police forces. Stalking, both physical and electronic, has become more common with the digital era.
The structural problem these patterns share is evidentiary timing. Harm happens in private or under conditions of asymmetric power. The victim's account is often disputed, dismissed, or weaponised against them by the same systems that exist to protect them. Documentation captured contemporaneously, controlled by the victim, hidden from the perpetrator, and presentable to multiple receiving institutions (police, courts, employers, social services, immigration authorities, civil-rights organizations) is the difference between a credible case and a he-said-she-said dismissal. That documentation is exactly what most victims do not have, and the platforms that exist to support victims — shelters, hotlines, employee assistance programs, civilian-oversight bodies — provide support but not portable receipts the victim retains.
Several platforms operate in adjacent space. DocuSAFE from the National Network to End Domestic Violence captures evidence with limited cryptographic anchoring. Aspire News disguises domestic violence resources as a news app. Save the Date and Smart Safe support specific safety needs. Callisto aggregates workplace harassment reports anonymously. ACLU Mobile Justice and FiveO capture police-encounter video. Each addresses part of the problem. None combines cryptographic anchoring, refresh discipline, hidden-from-perpetrator storage, multi-witness coordination, and multi-jurisdictional readability into a single victim-controlled architecture.
PLENA Personal Safety Attestation is built to be that architecture. It is documentation infrastructure, not rescue, not enforcement, not therapy. It produces the receipt layer that makes the existing victim-support infrastructure effective by giving it something to act on.
Five workflows PlenaProof covers
Each workflow produces four artifacts: a sealed declaration, the underlying evidence archive, a refresh or yearbook capturing change over time, and a multilingual handover packet calibrated to the receiving forum.
Incident Documentation
Per-incident witnessed video and photographic capture of harm, threats, or violations, with timestamp, location, witnesses where present, perpetrator identification where possible. Particularly for IPV, photographs of injuries and recorded threats; for harassment, recorded conversations and witnessed statements; for police encounters, video of the encounter itself; for stalking, screenshots and patterns of contact.
- Incident Declaration. Sealed statement of what occurred, when, where, with whom present.
- Sealed Evidence Packet. Photographs, video, audio, screenshots — hashed and anchored.
- Witness Attestation where applicable.
- Multilingual Handover Packet calibrated to the receiving forum.
Pattern Documentation
Periodic refresh of the ongoing pattern of harm: dates, frequencies, escalations, triggers, changes in perpetrator behavior. Pattern documentation is what distinguishes a credible case from a disputed single incident and is what courts increasingly require for protective orders, custody determinations, and immigration relief (US VAWA, UK Domestic Abuse Act, equivalent regimes).
- Pattern Declaration. Sealed statement of the cumulative pattern as the victim understands it.
- Sealed Pattern Evidence Archive. All prior incident receipts bundled with the pattern declaration.
- Annual Yearbook. Year-over-year refresh capturing escalation or de-escalation.
- Multilingual Handover Packet. Deliverable to family court, immigration adjudicator, or civil counsel.
Reporting and Institutional Response Documentation
Receipts of reports made (to police, to HR, to oversight bodies), the institutional responses (or non-responses), the retaliation that often follows. Critical because the institutional response failure is itself evidence in subsequent civil suits, regulatory complaints, and political accountability proceedings.
- Reporting Declaration. Sealed account of what was reported, to whom, on what date.
- Sealed Institutional Response Archive. Receipts of responses, non-responses, and follow-up exchanges.
- Refresh Yearbook. Periodic update on institutional handling.
- Multilingual Handover Packet to oversight bodies.
Safety Planning and Designated Releaser Architecture
Pre-authored sealed declaration of circumstances and trigger conditions under which the victim's designated releaser (a trusted friend, family member, attorney, or advocacy organization) can access and release the documentation. Critical for IPV cases where the victim may become unreachable, and for police-encounter cases where the documenter may be in custody.
- Safety Plan Declaration. Sealed statement of the victim's circumstances and intent.
- Designated Releaser Authority Receipt. The named releaser, the scope of their authority, the conditions of release.
- Trigger Conditions Documentation. The events or absence of contact that authorize release.
- Multilingual Release Packet. Pre-formatted for the named recipients on trigger.
Multi-Forum Handover and Continuity
Structured handover packets calibrated to the evidentiary expectations of different receiving forums — criminal courts, family courts, employment tribunals, immigration adjudicators, internal affairs, civil rights organizations, journalist investigations, class-action plaintiffs' counsel. The same underlying receipts presented in the formats each forum recognizes.
- Multi-Forum Declaration. The victim's intended presentation across the receiving bodies.
- Forum-Specific Evidence Compilations. Same evidence, multiple presentations.
- Continuity Yearbook across multiple proceedings.
- Multilingual Handover Packet.
Institutional version
A parallel set of artifacts for victim-service organizations, civil-rights bodies, and oversight institutions.
Aggregated infrastructure for victim-service organizations, civil-rights bodies, and oversight institutions. Target buyers and partners: National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) and national equivalents; National Domestic Violence Hotline network; UN Women; Women's Aid (UK); shelter networks (Polaris Project, La Strada International, regional shelter consortia); civil-rights legal organizations (ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, equivalents globally — Liberty in UK, La Quadrature in France, Human Rights Law Centre in Australia); EEOC and equivalents (Equality and Human Rights Commission in UK, Défenseur des droits in France); civilian police-oversight bodies; immigration legal aid organizations handling VAWA and analogous petitions.
Same complement-not-replace disclaimer. PlenaProof does not rescue, shelter, adjudicate, or enforce. It produces the receipt layer that makes existing victim-support infrastructure effective by giving it something to act on.
The 100-Year Operating Commitment
Adapted for a population whose perpetrator, employer, or institutional respondent has an active interest in the documentation disappearing.
PLENA Personal Safety Attestation is built on the assumption that the perpetrator, the employer, the police department, and the platform that hosted the documentation may all have an interest in the documentation disappearing — and that the victim's interest in the documentation persisting may outlast any of their cooperation. Where actually implemented and populated, the intended architecture replicates each artifact across multiple independent archives and anchors it cryptographically to public records that do not depend on any single jurisdiction, and verifiable offline by the victim or their designated releaser. Receipts survive perpetrator retaliation, institutional cover-up, platform deplatforming, and the multi-year arc of civil-rights and family-court proceedings.
Why this differs from existing victim-documentation platforms
DocuSAFE captures evidence but with limited cryptographic anchoring and limited multi-jurisdictional handover discipline. Callisto aggregates reports anonymously rather than producing victim-controlled receipts. Mobile Justice apps capture police-encounter video but do not provide refresh discipline or pattern documentation. Each is excellent for its specific use case; none is the unified receipt layer.
Cryptographic anchoring
Survives institutional document-loss in ways unsigned video does not.
Refresh discipline
Captures patterns over time rather than only incidents.
Designated-releaser architecture
The victim controls access including from beyond reach.
Multi-forum handover
One receipt set readable across many institutional contexts.
Multilingual by design
Critical for migrant and non-English-primary populations.
Interoperable
Videos captured in Mobile Justice and similar can be imported and PLENA-anchored.
Existing instruments this complements
- US Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and reauthorizations
- UK Domestic Abuse Act 2021
- EU Victims' Rights Directive 2012/29/EU
- Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women
- Title VII (US workplace harassment)
- UK Equality Act 2010
- UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women working methods
- Civilian police-oversight statutes
- Victim-witness protection programs in each jurisdiction
What this does not do
PLENA Personal Safety Attestation does not provide rescue, shelter, medical care, or therapy. It does not adjudicate cases. It does not enforce protective orders or restraining orders. It does not bring perpetrators to justice or constitute criminal prosecution. It does not provide legal aid, though it produces receipts that legal aid can act on. It does not transfer funds or guarantee any specific institutional response. It does not assess credibility of the documentation it preserves — it documents.
Languages and the human-reviewer queue
This page launches in PLENA's 8 live languages. Priority human-reviewer queue specific to this product: Vietnamese, Tagalog, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, Haitian Creole — languages where immigrant populations face limited access to victim services in the major English-speaking jurisdictions. Contact hello@joinplena.com for translator inquiries. See the full Translation Roadmap.
Scholarship and norms
This product is built in conversation with:
- UN Women annual reports on violence against women
- WHO Global and Regional Estimates of Violence Against Women
- CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
- National Network to End Domestic Violence guidance documents
- Trauma-Informed Documentation literature
- Lenore Walker, The Battered Woman Syndrome
- Civil-rights documentation methodology from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights
- The PLENA white paper Beyond the Will
Related PLENA receipt grammar
For victim-service organizations, civil-rights bodies, and oversight institutions
NNEDV, UN Women, Women's Aid (UK), shelter networks; ACLU, NAACP LDF, SPLC, Liberty, La Quadrature, HRLC; EEOC, EHRC, Défenseur des droits; civilian police-oversight bodies; immigration legal aid organizations handling VAWA and analogous petitions: PlenaProof welcomes pilot conversations.