France: online violence against minors increased by 57% in 2020
The e-Enfance association protects children and teenagers from the dangers of the internet.
Getty Images - Marko Geber
Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow
3 min
Webcam blackmail, degrading photomontages, harassment, insults: cyberviolence targeting minors jumped in 2020 compared to the previous year, warns the association e-Enfance.
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Online violence is directly linked to successive confinements which force children, adolescents and their parents to use computer equipment originally intended for digital entertainment.
Victims, witnesses or stalkers
An overconnection that has perhaps trivialized, in adults as in the youngest, aggressive behavior on the web, believes Mathilde Serre, spokesperson for
Lab Heyme
, an endowment fund intended to help other non-profit organizations. lucrative to organize and support actions in the social, health and education fields.
"
The fact of being in permanent over-connectedness necessarily increases the fact of being confronted with online violence and this must re-examine us, on how we surround young people, how to be able to become referents of trust for them and to be listening to the difficulties they encounter online,
emphasizes Mathilde Serre
.
About 10% of young people tend to trivialize the violence they observe or experience.
Cyber-harassment, during the confinement of March-April, developed using new digital tools that had been put in place precisely because of the confinement.
Especially during virtual classes in which nearly one in 10 teenagers say they have witnessed cyber-bullying behavior.
So even in spaces that are supposed to be educational and learning spaces, cyber-bullying is also spreading.
And the problem is, as much as parents are able to identify their children as victims, on the other hand, it is much more difficult to admit that their own children may be the perpetrators of these acts of cyberbullying. .
"
A worrying trivialization
The e-Enfance association manages a listening platform dedicated to these worrying online phenomena.
The number of calls in 2020 to the national toll free number for the protection of minors
Net Ecoute
has almost doubled, from 2,747 in 2019 to 4,315 in less than a year.
On its web platform, the association has identified 12,000 messages denouncing online violence ranging from the extortion of personal data, to exposure to shocking content such as videos of a sexual nature among many adolescents.
But another scourge also threatens the teenage generation with the resurgence of hard-hitting online harassment on social networks which more and more often leads to tragedies.
For its 18th edition, the
Safer Internet Day,
the international day to raise awareness of the dangers of the web will take place this Tuesday, February 9.
This year the event will be entirely dedicated to the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on the digital uses of young Internet users.
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