2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

Child sexual abuse is a big issue in the gulf where no one wants to talk about it, even kids themselves. Khaliji society is considered mainly as a conservative society, which makes talking about sexual abuse a very complicated issue since a lot of people live in denial of the facts. We needed to make a statement and draw people's attention not be silent about child sexual abuse in a smart way.

Describe the strategy

After going through focus groups involving medical and social advisers, we've come to a conclusion that the first step to counter child-sexual-abuse is to encourage telling and talking about it, especially from kids. Because of the fact that the abuser's main fear is being told on and to be recognized as a “sex offender” especially in Muslim societies. All it takes is for the child to speak up and be believed. We chose to focus the campaign activation on Twitter since it is the main platform where news go viral in the Khaliji society. ”Children never make up stories about being sexually abused. In fact victims are often revictimized in multiple ways for truthfully asserting they have been sexually abused.” - Kathleen Coulborn Faller M.S.W., Ph.D. Inspired by the words of dr. Kathleen we used the classic story of "the Kid Who Cried Wolf" as an approach to our video

Describe the execution

We launched the campaign on multiple levels: 1. A video that went viral and rose this issue to encourage parents and guardians to believe their kids saying: “This is not the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. 2. Follow-up content: Educational infographics to help understand and how to deal with such complicated issue. 3. Online sexual abuse pivot: Since a lot of parents think their kids are safe at home, we launched a 2D video about online sexual abuse. 4. Engagement (not to be silent about stamp): Because talking about sexual abuse is not easy, we gave people a stamp they can use in their profile picture to protest children sexual abuse. 5. Educate kids: We published three stories for free in addition to a short cartoon published on Spacetoon channel. 6. A one stop website & PDF file: To make sure this stays for life.

List the results

The results were outstanding with over 14 million views, around 300 million impressions, over 12,900 likes and retweets, more than 370 quote tweets. By then child sexual abuse was the talk of the gulf with over 42,000 posts all saying “Child sexual abuse is not to be silent about”, and over 500 people changed their profile pictures on social media with the stamp in solidarity with the issue.