Trauma-Informed Insights from Co-Design of Self-Disclosure Robots with Domestic Abuse Survivors

Survivors of domestic abuse face significant challenges securing recovery resources, such as housing, mental health care, and social connections. Accessing these resources requires survivors to disclose their status as survivors of domestic abuse; a process that can be traumatic and emotionally burdensome. In this work, we consider how social robots might help domestic abuse survivors to address challenges surrounding self-disclosure. To do so, we conducted a three-session co-design workshop involving 8 participants from a domestic abuse shelter. Our results provide three key contributions: (1) new insights into the benefits and barriers to self-disclosure; (2) new insights into the ways that social robots can help survivors to better achieve those benefits and overcome those barriers before, during, and after disclosure, including key design recommendations associated with each of these phases; and (3) observations into how a trauma-informed computing perspective may enable more effective design work in Human-Robot Interaction.