About Us

This is an initiative of Trust for Youth and Child Leadership International: TYCL International creates safe, inclusive, and participative spaces for and with young people and their allies to realize their full potential through innovative leadership models.

Problem

Globally, 33 percent of children and young people have internet access at home. Two-thirds of the world’s school-age children have no internet access at home. The possibilities of entering the dark web are easy through social media platforms. The most common problems faced by children online are:

Online grooming: Befriend and prepare children for sexual purposes
Child sexual abuse/exploitation material: sexting children & a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or representation of the sexual parts of a child or production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Sexual trade of children: online networks and enterprises manufacturing, trading, distributing, and/or selling CSAM.
Child abductions: the mysterious disappearance of a child, especially a minor of tender years (12 or younger).
Child Sex Tourism: domestic and international travel to engage in sexual activity with children
Live streaming of child sexual abuse: the real-time broadcasting of child sexual abuse to viewers in remote locations
Cyberbullying: Misuse of technology with the intention to harass children

Work

Village Innovation and Incubation Lab (ViiL)

A space for inclusive innovation using hybrid indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies. The Viil offers STREAM (science, technology, rights and responsibilities, ethical engineering, arts, and math) curriculum to support next-generation inclusive, ethical innovators, and technologists from diverse backgrounds. In addition, ViiL offers one-year incubation support to make children’s innovation dream a reality to develop safe technologies with no bias and harm to people and the planet.

Kaali - Online Safety for Every Child

A web plugin for online safety for every child to detect, report and remove child sexual abuse materials from web browsers in regional languages. Kaali will optimize text, images, and videos based on the size of the content and Dots Per Inch (DPI) and make it a safe and user-friendly online space for the children.

INAGI- A Child-Centered Visual SWOT

Extended Reality(ER) to create visual SWOT depictions of the child-centered social justice initiatives in vulnerable communities to promote collective voices for child rights.

Resources

Children: Click International Child Helplines to find your country’s Helpline for children to report crimes against children

Parents: Resources for Parents to keep your children safe online

Other Stakeholders: The following organizations are working on cutting-edge research and practice for online child safety. Please use the following links to learn the best practices.

End Violence Against Children Resources and partnerships for a world in which every child grows up safe and secure.
Project iGuardian is focused on keeping children and teens safe from online predators through education and awareness.
CESIUM application safeguarding professionals as a tool to inform and support their work in combating and preventing child exploitation.
Thorn to protect children from sexual exploitation through three strategic pillars: 1) accelerating victim identification 2) equipping platforms, and 3) empowering the public.
ECPAT’s work to better understand the problem through research and push for the critical systemic and social changes necessary to end the sexual exploitation of children with governments, intergovernmental institutions, the private sector, civil society, and the general public, including with the children themselves.

Resources

Kali also aims to contribute in developing articles and open for opportunities for collaboration and research. The project team will adopt a mixed methodology by adopting participatory action research techniques to test the product viability to scale and adapt to other regional languages. The quantitative and qualitative data will be collected from children and stakeholders to validate the project and based on the users’ experiences computational data will be gathered. The data will be gathered from all the sources and will be triangulated and analyzed to validate the project efficiency and outcome.

Get Involved

The following ways for you to engage with us to be a part of the mission to ensure safe, inclusive child-friendly online communities for every child, everywhere.

Volunteer/Intern: Minimum 10Hrs/week to engage in our work virtually or in-person in our partner organizations in the global south. Please use the below form to reach out to us.

Tech Partner: If you’re a tech start-up/company, please reach out to us by using the form below to co-build tech solutions for children.