In 2012, Daisy Coleman was a freshman at Maryville High School when she was sexually assaulted. After the fallout from this assault and the blowback from the community, she became a prominent advocate from other youth survivors of sexual violence.
In 2016, she appeared in the documentary, “Audrie & Daisy,” and not long after she and several other survivors created SafeBAE, a youth-led nonprofit that aims to teach middle school and high school students about consent and safety.
Daisy died by suicide in 2020, but her brother Charlie and Shael Norris, SafeBAE’s executive director, have continued this work. They spoke about the importance of giving kids a safe place to ask questions.
For the month of October, we’re focusing on the stories of those living in Maryville and Nodaway County.
Shael Norris: So many times we see the siloing of, like, “We only work with survivors,” “We only work with perpetrators,” and yet there's so much overlap.
And we also don't want anybody who may have, like, misread a cue or if their intention didn't match the outcome — we want them to be able to find a pathway back from that.
So, we created an awesome reflection tool. Again, no AI involved in it whatsoever. It's all evidence, based in human responses. It's called Vibe Check, and you can find it right on the front page of our website.
It's a way for kids to ask vulnerable questions that they would normally ask on Reddit because on Reddit, they're going to get really bad answers, and in ChatGPT, they're going to get pretty questionable answers.
So, we wanted to provide an alternative to that because it’s such a necessary thing, like, people who like, you know, say, “I think I might have harmed somebody because they're ghosting me or they told me, ‘You harmed me.’”
And then they're trying to figure out where they went wrong, but they don't have a place to do that, [and that’s] such a direct on ramp to manosphere communities and this, you know, really harmful conversations where you might be guided to or instinctively go toward trying to blame the person who made that accusation against you.
Instead of saying, "Wait, maybe I did cause harm that I didn't mean to cause,” and so, I'm going to be able to say, "I'm sorry,” and you know, work toward not causing harm again and educating myself so I know where I went wrong.
Charlie Coleman: I mean, this generation is a lot different than when you and I were growing up. I mean, we were just in the beginning of the internet boom.
So, it's so different from when we were growing up. We didn't have access to everything at the tip of our fingers. Not everybody knew what sites to go to — Googling only went so far, right? So, educating ourselves was a lot harder,
Now, kids have it at the tips of their fingers. You can access our stuff through our Instagram page. You can go to our TikTok. I know we got a Facebook page.
We have the website in general, and all of our links are there — every bit of information that you could need about anything that we offer is on safebae.org.
I think we worked really hard and done a really good job at keeping it really accessible for people.
It's so easy — you would never have to Google anything. All you got to Google is SafeBAE, and then it's boom right there. It's the first thing that you see.
And, to me, that's amazing because it's come so far since even we started SafeBAE, and the resources are all there for free, so there's no excuse not to.
