Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody have any stats for the use of these kinds of buttons? A few of our clients - victim services and honour-based abuse services - ask us to add these kinds of buttons, but I've always wondered they actually get used instead of e.g. people just closing the browser window. The issue for us with adding tracking is that it would slow the interaction which, even if it was only a few milliseconds, isn't something we want to risk. (Or worse, if the JS it breaks and the link doesn't work). I guess it would have to be some kind of post-hoc survey for victims of domestic abuse who've used a site and are now somewhere safe.

Edit - thanks to @jdietrich below there are some stats on this link, which shows a correlation between events you'd expect to increase the rush of domestic abuse, such as the Covid lockdowns: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/... I do wonder how they got those stats though.

Edit 2 - I'm so glad this got posted! I've been wondering about this for ages and it's really nice to get some evidence for its use. Reading through the comments has also solidified my thinking around "why don't people just close the browser window" - many people who use honour-based abuse services are very computer illiterate, don't have time to learn about incognito windows / (Ctrl | Command) + W, and can only snatch computer time here and there. Abusers can look back at the browser history, but if the choice is between being discovered on an honour-based abuse website or the chance that the abuser won't look at the history, the second is clearly superior.

Edit 3 - I really wonder about the three-press shift keyboard shortcut. Real lack of discoverability, and my worry would be that the lack of consistency across sites would lead to situations where people are on non-gov.uk websites and think that keyboard shortcut would work there too. Although I suppose the fact that the first shift press activates the button in some way does tie it to the presence of the button on screen.

Edit 4 - It doesn't seem to be in use on any relevant gov.uk pages. The pilot on the "check for legal aid" pages seems to have ended and it's not on the pages about domestic abuse.

Most probably they're using the sendBeacon method triggered by the visibilitychange event. sendBeacon doesn't delay the unload and asynchronously makes the network request simultaneously.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

Thanks, that's really useful to know - I might try and implement something like that on the sites that we run.

Yeah the fact that there's no concrete demo beyond the basic JavaScript snippet/demo makes me wonder how well this actually works. I wanted to know how users are informed to press shift repeatedly to use the button? It's weird UX.

It does remind me of "boss keys" that old DOS games used to have.

can you expand on what honour based abuse means?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing

> An honor killing (American English), honour killing (Commonwealth English), or shame killing is a traditional form of murder in which a person is killed by or at the behest of members of their family or their partner, due to culturally sanctioned beliefs that such homicides are necessary as retribution for the perceived dishonoring of the family by the victim.

> Methods of murdering include stoning, stabbing, beating, burning, beheading, hanging, throat slashing, lethal acid attacks, shooting, and strangulation. Sometimes, communities perform murders in public to warn others in the community of the possible consequences of engaging in what is seen as illicit behavior

> Often, minor girls and boys are selected by the family to act as the murderers, so that the murderer may benefit from the most favorable legal outcome. Boys and sometimes women in the family are often asked to closely control and monitor the behavior of their siblings or other members of the family, to ensure that they do not do anything to tarnish the 'honor' and 'reputation' of the family

> Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, says that honor killing is: "A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Islamic society. .. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. Honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility or reproductive power."

> Nighat Taufeeq of the women's resource center Shirkatgah in Lahore, Pakistan says: "It is an unholy alliance that works against women: the killers take pride in what they have done, the tribal leaders condone the act and protect the killers and the police connive the cover-up." The lawyer and human rights activist Hina Jilani says, "The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."

> Fareena Alam, editor of a Muslim magazine, writes that honor killings which arise in Western cultures such as Britain are a tactic for immigrant families to cope with the alienating consequences of urbanization. Alam argues that immigrants remain close to the home culture and their relatives because it provides a safety net. She writes that 'In villages "back home", a man's sphere of control was broader, with a large support system. In our cities full of strangers, there is virtually no control over who one's family members sit, talk or work with.'

Hopefully that expands on it. A rotten culture of "family values" that sees women as nothing more than baby factories and keeps them under control at all times, through intimidation, persecution, monitoring, and straight up state-sanctioned killing and blaming of the victim if they try to assert themselves.

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