Sweden
Big Sister Webcam
Organization: Tjejzonen
Project: Big Sister Webcam
Location: Online, Sweden
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse
Childhood helped fund the very popular and academically evaluated online chat resources for at-risk girls, which Tjejzonen developed and continues to run. The project Big Sister Webcam is an evolution driven by the needs and wishes expressed by girls at risk. It combines anonymous chat communication addressing difficult issues with face to face mentorship bonding via webcams.
Read more: www.tjejzonen.se
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Say What You Saw
Project: Sag yad du sag (Say What You Saw) Initiative
Location: Malmö, Sweden
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse, Street children,
Children in alternative care
In 2018, Childhood, with support from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, launched a new initiative to reduce the opportunities for Swedish offenders to abuse children in foreign countries. The Säg vad du såg (“Say what you saw”) project is conducted together with Ecpat, the Swedish Police and the Swedish Gender Equality Agency. “Usually, we work directly with children and families to reduce the risk of violence and abuse. But we also need to focus on the offenders: those who travel to sexually abuse children. As offenders change their travel patterns and methods, our initiatives also need to be updated. In this project, we are doing exactly that,” says Joel Borgström, program manager at Childhood and project head for Say what you saw.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Trauma in Children-A Handbook
Project: Trauma in Children-A Handbook
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse, Children in alternative, Street children
“Trauma in Children – A Handbook” (Swedish: “Traumatisering hos barn – en handbok”) provides readers with the knowledge and tools to discover, assess and treat trauma in children and their families. An abundance of case studies and dialogues bring the content to life and help to create an understanding of a complex subject.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Hidden in the Park
Organization: University of SKÖVDE
Project: Hidden in the Park
Location: Online
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse, Children who are at risk of abuse
Researchers at the University of Skövde have developed an interactive board game – Parkgömmet (translates as Hidden in the Park) – for primary school children. The foundation Change Attitude came up with the idea to let children learn how to navigate risks online through playing a game. Parkgömmet is a physical board game making use of augmented reality through a tablet or smartphone. Each player hides a treasure and there are clues to help them find the hidden treasures. The players have to keep the clues safe so that no one else can find the treasure. But there are chat messages from an unknown player which use different tactics to make the children reveal clues.
The developers at the University of Skövde had access to authentic chat logs from websites where children were contacted by strangers seeking sexual communication, which is unique. While the chat logs have been used to create the game, the actual game does not contain any scary or inappropriate content. However, the game events create a basis for follow-up discussions to raise children’s awareness of online risks. These discussions are led by a teacher or an educator. A prototype of the game has been tested on children with positive results.
Funding from Childhood is being used to complete the game and for research into how the game can be used in the classroom. The goal is that the game can be used in schools, together with teacher-led classroom discussion. Today the game and accompanying methodological material is a collaborative effort between Change Attitude, the University of Skövde and World Childhood Foundation.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Safer Society
Organization: Safer Society
Location: online
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse
According to police estimates, 15,000 people in Sweden alone downloaded images of child abuse from the Internet in 2016. Organizations that document the number of websites that link to material portraying sexual abuse of children report that the number may be more than a hundred thousand per year. This figure does not include the sites that are hidden on the dark web, meaning sites that cannot be reached using search engines such as Google.
When the police seize images of child abuse, enormous amounts of material are often involved – a single case may contain hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of hours of videos. With such enormous amounts of material to review, the police must decide at an early stage which hard drives, folders and files are to be investigated first, a process that is currently extremely demanding in terms of resources. Childhood is now financing a pilot project in which our partner Safer Society is working to develop software that can help the police to prioritize cases at an early stage and quickly identify vulnerable children and suspected perpetrators. The goal is for this to become a tool for police globally, which will help them to find the right material and thus be able to come to children’s rescue more swiftly.
Read more: https://www.safersociety.org/
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Reach
Organization: Department of Women and Children’s Health, Uppsala University
Project: Reach
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Target group: Women and children at risk
REACH is a multidisciplinary research group at the Department of Women and Children’s Health at Uppsala University that is working to improve women and children’s health in Sweden and internationally. The research aims to develop methods that can help professionals promote children’s health, prevent ill health, and identify problems at an early stage, making it possible to offer appropriate help and action. The “Barnsäkert” project is a collaboration between REACH and the central child healthcare organizations in Uppsala and Dalarna, and is being funded by Childhood. Barnsäkert’s mission is to test and evaluate the Safe Environment for Every Kid (SEEK) model to see whether it can effectively contribute to preventing child abuse by identifying early psychosocial risk factors in the child’s home environment and providing relevant support and assistance to the family. Selected child healthcare centers in Dalarna county will use the SEEK screening form when parents are visiting and, when necessary, refer them for the right support and assistance.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Vilda Says No!
Project: Vilda Says No!
Location: Online, Sweden
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse or at risk
Vilda Says NO! is a book that provides children with information about integrity and the right to their own body. It teaches children to put into words the various parts of the body and different feelings, and to talk about things that do not feel good. Vilda Says NO! was first published in 2006, with support from Childhood. We are now financing a reprint of the book and thereby helping to make the book available to new generations of children, parents, preschool classes and teachers.
Talking about abuse with small children is difficult and distressing for many. But we know that silence is the perpetrator’s best friend, and it allows abuse to continue.
Teaching children that they can and may say “no” to adults when something does not feel good is important, but this is never enough – the responsibility for preventing abuse must never be placed on a child. How we adults act and the signals we give are even more important. Vilda Says NO! also serves as a textbook for adults when it comes to respecting children’s boundaries in small everyday ways.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Maskrosbarn
Organization: Maskrosbarn
Location: Stolkholm, Sweden
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse
Maskrosbarn is a non-profit organization founded in 2005. Its main aim is to support children and young people with parents suffering from addiction or mental illness. The employees at Maskrosbarn all have personal experience from growing up with addiction or mental illness. Maskrosbarn’s activities aim to help young people become more resilient and to reduce the feeling of isolation and disgrace and instead offer positive life experiences and a feeling of belonging.
For six years, Childhood has supported Maskrosbarn’s summer camps for more than 100 young people aged 14-19, who all have parents suffering from addiction or mental illness. Maskrosbarn also organizes events on Friday evenings as well as Christmas and autumn-break camps and offers personal coaches who support the young people in their daily lives and their contacts with the authorities. Childhood has now established a new cooperation with Maskrosbarn. Its aim is to test an alternative for children and young people who need immediate placement, filling a gap before a contact family, foster family or family home has been identified. This placement will be drawn up entirely by children and young people who have personal experience of these types of situations. New methods are rarely designed by people who are directly affected, so Childhood sees this as a highly innovative and important initiative. It is hoped that this method can contribute to reducing the number of unsuccessful placements, but above all to increasing the number of successful placements where children and young people fare better.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org
Prevent It
Organization: Anova
Project: Prevent It
Location: Stolkholm, Sweden
Target group: Children who are victims of abuse or at risk
ANOVA, Karolinska University Hospital (KS), is an assessment and treatment clinic for andrology, sexual medicine and trans medicine/gender dysphoria that conducts research in the same areas. The overall aim of ANOVA’s work is to contribute to better health among patients with medical problems relating to sexual and reproductive health and to prevent sexual abuse and violence. ANOVA is also responsible for Preventell, a helpline for unwanted sexuality – read more at preventell.se. ANOVA has several research projects that are aimed in various ways at preventing sexual abuse of children.
The objective of the Prevent_IT research project is to test whether CBT treatment with the support of a psychotherapist over the Internet is an effective treatment model for people who view documented child sexual abuse. The method is based on experience from earlier research results in projects associated with ANOVA (Kafka_IT and Priotab) and from clinical experiences from Preventell. The project also gathers experience and knowledge of the target groups that may be of help in the continuing effort to find effective ways of preventing child sexual abuse.
Contact person at Childhood:
Susanne Drakborg
susanne.drakborg(a)childhood.org