The Internet, mobile phones and other digital media provide children and young people with many educational and social benefits and are a must-have for the majority of children and adolescents nowadays.
They use the new technologies to chat, maintain contact, sending pictures and sharing information. However, the usage of the internet and mobile phones involves also high potential for risks, due to the anonymous nature of communication.
For most children, online activity does not lead to harm. However, the increased risk of sexual abuse, exploitation and other forms of harm in both online and offline settings demands a coordinated response by governments, parents, professionals, business and young people themselves.
Contact and relationships among individuals with common interests, but otherwise limited opportunity for interaction are now possible. Such contact can be established quickly, anonymously and with ease through new communication tools. While the majority of interactions that take place through communication technologies available to us today, open opportunities for beneficial exchange among the individuals involved, a significant number are ill intended. In this regard, evidence indicates that the basic elements that make new technologies so advantageous for communication are also those that are used by individuals with criminal intent and those that seek to harm and abuse children.
The ease of falsifying information and identities opens new doors for people aiming to commit crimes. Therefore, it is very important to question contents, which can be found on the internet and to analyse the situation when engaging into contact with a "stranger" on the internet. For instance, it is very easy for everyone to log onto a social platform and to pretend that he or she is 14 years old, while the person actually is 35 years old. The make-IT-safe project dealt with these issues mentioned above and its objective was to sensitize young people to possible online risks. As young people tend to listen rather to people of their same age than to adults, the ECPAT groups decided to apply the peer-to-peer method.
With financial support from the DAPHNE Programme of the European Union.
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