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.

Describe the execution

To deliver this message in a culturally relevant way, we used the classic story of "the Kid Who Cried Wolf". In the video, we showed a boy who was, on multiple occasions, talking about being sexually abused where he was not believed by the family. At the end of the video we showed the shadow of the abuser with a message stating (This is not the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, believe your children when they tell you they were sexually abused). The campaign took around 3 weeks starting by the film that went viral, infographics and content, then a video about online child abuse and we ended the campaign by publishing three comic books to be read by the parents to their kids.

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.