The second year of the GSMA’s partnership with Child Helpline International (CHI) has focused on creating a safer internet, and how the two organisations’ members can support each other’s many endeavours in this area. Whilst child helplines in many countries have experience in dealing with contacts relating to internet issues, they are a new or emerging trend in others. The GSMA’s member operators are working with their child helpline partners to help young people deal with issues such as cyberbullying, sexual extortion and online privacy.
To support this work, the GSMA and CHI co-hosted a workshop in May 2016. The session brought together expertise from the child helpline community, mobile operators and other industry players, NGOs, child online safety experts (including a specialist child and adolescent psychiatrist) and law enforcement.
The workshop kick-started the process of creating a series of high level guides for counsellors on nine common or challenging digital issues that lead young people to seek advice from child helplines. The nine guides, which were launched in November 2016 at the CHI International Consultation, cover topics such as cyberbullying, discrimination and hate speech, grooming, illegal content, inappropriate content, privacy, sexual extortion, sexual harassment and unsolicited contact.
The guides, referenced above, are now available in English, French, Spanish and Arabic and can be found here. The GSMA is grateful to the many people who generously gave their time and expertise to create the guides, and to Millicom and Zain for sponsoring the translation of the guides into Spanish and Arabic.
To mark Safer Internet Day 2017, the GSMA worked with Insafe (a European network of Awareness Centres promoting safer and better usage of internet) and CHI to create a new guide. Understanding Young People’s Use Of Technology aims to help child helplines and their counsellors to cope with the ever-evolving digital habits of children and young people. Suggestions range from focusing on core principles that apply across all services, to setting up a ‘youth panel’ to get first hand insights into the pressures young people are facing online, as well as the apps, platforms and services which are most popular. The GSMA is grateful to CHI and Insafe for their support, friendship and ongoing work to keep young people safe online, and looks forward to continuing the partnership.
On Safer Internet Day, the GSMA also attended the European Commission’s high level meeting of the Alliance to Better Protect Minors Online at which the Commission presented the Alliance’s Statement of Purpose which is supported by a number of ICT companies including GSMA members BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, Liberty Global, Orange, TIM, Telefónica, Telenor, Telia Company and Vodafone.