CollectiveSafetyNet

How Student Associations Can Make Campus Dating Safer at Scale — Without Platforms The False Choice in Campus Dating Safety Universities tend to frame dating safety as a binary problem. Either  nothing happens —students are told to “be careful,” trust their instincts, and navigate risk alone—or harm escalates into  formal reporting, disciplinary proceedings, and institutional intervention. Both options fail most of the time. Most dating-related harm on campuses is  real but sub-threshold : boundary pressure, coercive behavior, repeated disrespect, emotional manipulation, unsafe situations that never quite crystallize into a reportable offense. These harms are rarely isolated incidents; they are  patterns . And yet the systems universities rely on are designed only for singular events, not recurring behavior. As a result, campuses unintentionally create an unsafe equilibrium: Survivors are discouraged from speaking  because escalation is costly and adversarial. R...

Making Peer-to-Peer Exchange Safe Without Platforms The Problem: Trust Failure at the Smallest Scale Consumer-to-consumer markets—second-hand sales, local services, online classifieds, peer rentals—are where trust fails most quietly and most often. These markets are characterized by: One-off or infrequent interactions Low margins but high friction Weak formal enforcement Asymmetric information High retaliation and fraud risk Limited recourse after harm Platforms like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and Craigslist attempted to solve this through visibility and ratings. They succeeded in increasing transaction volume—but not in reducing harm. The result is familiar: Scams persist Harassment is common Retaliation via reviews is routine Honest participants self-select out Informal markets become adversarial Once again, the failure is not moral. It is  architectural . Why C2C Markets Are Structurally Hard C2C exchanges lack the stabilizers present in employment or long-term commerce: ...