The International Center “La Strada” launches a campaign entitled “It’s more than an image, it’s abuse” in the context of Safer Internet Day, which is marked on February 7. According to Elena Botezatu, executive director of “La Strada”, the campaign comes to mobilize the population to get involved in order to make the internet safer, cleaner, better for every child, IPN reports.
Elena Botezatu noted that this year the campaign is dedicated to content that can be harmful to children and must be reported. Through this campaign, they aim to make every young person, young woman, parent, adult who in the virtual environment sees particular disturbing images or videos representing children in less pleasant situations to report them on siguronline.md. The campaign partners are the Ministry of Education and Research and UNICEF.
Valentina Olaru, secretary of state of the Ministry of Education and Research, noted that, in addition to developing digital skills, hygiene in the online environment should not be neglected. The child must be taught how to navigate in order to be protected and safe in communicating with peers, and not just with peers. The reality shows that teenagers, being captivated by different aspects of communication, often share many things related to their personal life and then receive inappropriate feedback. Preventing problems is better than overcoming the consequences. Parents need to control their children’s navigation online, but also explain to them so that they realize the dangers.
Flore Rossi, UNICEF representative, noted that online violence is a new form of emerging violence affecting children and adolescents and, unfortunately, Moldova is no exception. Trends show that an increasing number of children and adolescents in Moldova are becoming victims of sexual violence, violence in the online environment. That’s why this program was launched to protect adolescents, children and young people. The program comes to strengthen the mechanism for reporting cases of online sexual abuse to authorities and to increase access to legal and other services in this regard.
The title of the campaign is inspired by the very large number of reports of online child sexual abuse received by the International Center “La Strada”. In only nine months since the launch of the national reporting service, over 2,100 notifications were received and most of these were sent to hosting companies to be removed from the online environment. Based on these, over 5,700 materials containing video and photo images of children in sexually explicit situations were removed from the Internet. Nine out of 10 children were younger than 13. In seven cases, they were minors up to two years old, and in 12 cases the images were generated by artificial intelligence.
