Safe Online: Exploring Young People’s Experience of Peer-to-Peer Sexual Violence Online - Recommendations for Safety

Kathleen Manion was awarded funding though a grant from End Violence Against Children to identify and explore opportunities to protect children online using social norms research.

This research is driven by an underlying ethos to highlight the importance of children and youth’s participation in their own protection, where children and youth are seen as competent agentic beings with expertise to contribute to their own safety and wellbeing in partnership with adults. The research is topical, meaningful and can be shared widely with audiences who are well positioned to implement changes that support youth wellbeing and safety while online. Hillis and colleagues (2016) found over half of all children (2-17 years old) experienced violence, abuse or neglect within the previous year. COVID-19 exasperated the impacts and prevalence of violence on children (Bakrania et al, 2020).
Research has been conducted on the multi-pronged impacts of sexual abuse and exploitation of children online, but little has focused on understanding the social and gender norms that occur online that impact peer-to-peer child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA). CSEA research has tended to focus on adult perpetrators of violence, rather than peers. There is a dearth of research that examines the ideas that children and youth have in CSEA prevention by challenging destructive norms and bolstering supportive ones to create more safety within their digital experiences. Using social norms research, this project seeks to identify and explore opportunities to disrupt them (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Cialdini & Trout, 1998; Cialdini et al, Cislaghi & Heise).