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Lauren Reid has a unique contribution to the ongoing conversation about unreported rapes and the climate for addressing sexual assault claims.

Raped three times — once in high school and twice in university — her jaw-dropping experience had never been documented in any official record or police report.

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Now, the 30-year-old Toronto resident is using her professional background in big data and privacy to push for a national, anonymous, user-controlled and self-reported database on sexual assault.

It is an ambitious project, unprecedented in its scope, but it comes with its own set of complicated challenges and concerns.

Right now, the best self-reported data on sexual assault comes from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey on Victimization, in which a random sample of Canadians are asked, out of the blue and by phone, if they have ever been sexually assaulted. The most recent survey shows 6% of Canadian women self-reported a sexual assault — a number that activists believe is under-representative. An oft-cited statistic that one in four Canadian women have been sexually assaulted is routinely picked apart.