Preventing Online Violence Against Children

In this two-month project, 61 technology changemakers worked with the Technology for Development and Child Protection teams at Save the Children. The team analyzed various data sources such as online forums, articles, games, and more for insights and safety measures. The team also build Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to further analyze and understand patterns to prevent online violence against children.

The problem

Save the Children is a leading humanitarian organization for children that has improved the lives of more than 1 billion children around the world and in the U.S.

Save the Children’s goals:

1. Keep children alive until their 5th birthday, when their prospects for survival are greatly improved
2. Ensure that all children have access to a quality education
3. Protect children against violence

When Save the Children was founded more than 100 years ago, much of the violence that children faced was related to World War I and its aftermath. Today, children face a new threat: online violence. Violence and harassment of children have been growing exponentially for more than 20 years but, today, schools have closed for more than 1 billion children, leaving them more exposed to online violence than ever before.

The project falls under the UN´s Sustainable Development Goal 16.2, which is to “end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children”.

The project outcomes

Through analyzing social media, newspaper articles, and other available data sources, the team found insights on the severity, causes, and actors of online violence against children. The team also tried to model the behaviors of predators. However, for all solutions and technical specifics, check out the articles at the end of this page.