CyberSafeGirls: prevention and education instead of prohibition

On 15 October, a training on the use of the CYBERSAFE online tool for working with adolescents in the context of combating online sexual violence, including against girls, was launched in Kyiv for social workers and psychologists from social service centres in Kharkiv, Vinnytsia and Kyiv regions.

‘We are working to overcome online violence, there are many challenges around us now - we see offline violence,’ says Ilona Yeleneva, director of the NGO Labour and Health Social Initiatives (LHSI). ’But live communication with the training participants confirmed that the topics of online challenges are very relevant, because online and offline violence are often linked.

And sometimes you just want to ban teenagers from using gadgets, but this is not the most effective strategy. In fact, our training is about how to protect, how to reason with, teach teenagers how to protect themselves and feel safe even online.’

The training was the first event of the project ‘CyberSafeGirls: Ensuring Digital Safety of Ukrainian Girls’, implemented by the NGO Labour and Health Social Initiatives (LHSI) in partnership with the Teenergizer team in Ukraine and funded by the Human Rights Fund of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

Robert Dekker, Head of Political Section of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, opened the training and stressed that the embassy is proud to support such a project in Ukraine.

In this project, we focused on the prevention of online sexual violence against adolescent girls and educating local stakeholders and informing professionals, parents and guardians in three target oblasts - Kyiv, Vinnytsia and Kharkiv - about the types, methods and tools for preventing online violence against girls.

About 20 participants came to the training, and the next event will be a similar webinar for educators, for which almost 500 participants have already registered.