For a Human-Centered AI

STOP ONLINE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

November 25, 2022

StandByMe european projects aim at countering online Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) via youth actions in Italy, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the rest of Europe.

“STop online violence against women and girls by chANging attituDes and Behaviour of Young people through huMan rights Education” — StandByMe aims at countering online Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) via youth actions in Italy, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the rest of Europe.

StandByMe is implemented in two projects that will empower students to take action against online VAWG, facilitating their ability to detect it and supporting their voice as change agents, giving space to their unique vision and perspective. StandByMe 1.0 focuses on the links between offline and online gender-based violence, while StandByMe 2.0 counters toxic masculinity and related harmful stereotypes.

In both projects, partners will empower students to take action against online VAWG, facilitating their ability to detect it and supporting their voice as change agents, giving stakeholders and the general public their unique vision and perspective. The projects include the development and the delivering of comprehensive blended learning programs consisting of offline and online courses, educational materials, updated data and the possibility to take a wide range of actions.

FBK defines the overall StandByMe technical approach by taking into account both current trends of online VAWG, as well as requirements and needs of partners, stakeholders and target groups (i.e. NGOs, educational staff, high school students) for the prevention and fight against violence against women among young people. FBK will provide a set of digital tools facilitating the detection of gender hate and violence on social media platforms and supporting the realisation of gamified awareness raising actions targeting youth, in order to promote their active participation and reflection through gamified mobile and web apps. Moreover, digital storytelling will be used as a reflection tool to support counter-stories elaboration and facilitate the discussion on VAWG topics.

Partnership

The projects are coordinated by Amnesty International through 4 different european countries nodes: Amnesty International Italia; Stowarzyszenie Amnesty International (Amnesty International Poland); Amnesty International Magyarorszag (Amnesty International Hungary) and Drustvo Amnesty International Slovenije (Amnesty International Slovenia).

The Psychology and Cognitive Science Department of the University of Trento leads the activities for drafting of the socio-technical requirements for the digital platform and contributes to the evaluation activities aimed to assess the effectiveness of the StandByMe 2.0 platform.

Fondazione Bruno Kessler – FBK contributes to the project through the expertise of 3 reseach units of the Digital Society Centre: Digital Humanities (DH), Intelligent Interfaces and Interaction (i3) and MOtivational DIgital Systems (MoDiS) groups.

DH investigates methods and systems aimed at applying natural language processing to humanities and social sciences problems; working with historical archives, social media data, domain-specific and nonstandard language. DH researchers are interested in multilingualism and low-resource languages, and are fond of contributing to the Italian NLP community.

i3 is a research group in  human-computer interaction. Its focus is on using a highly interdisciplinary approach borrowed from cognitive and social sciences for the design of interaction modalities for digital technologies. The research objectives are at the same time technological—that is, developing innovative technologies—and social—that is, investigating how people use and benefit from these technologies. The emphasis is to investigate interactive experiences aimed at improving the quality of human interactions mediated by computers.

MoDiS investigates advanced methodologies and techniques supporting user engagement, motivation and behaviour change. Personalization is a key success factor of motivational systems; thus, particular attention is paid to game-based motivational and persuasive techniques aimed at dynamically tailoring the user experience to maximise the impact in terms of retainment and of individual/collective behaviour change. MoDiS has experience in the design, development and operation of game-based motivational systems and long-running campaigns targeting different user groups (e.g., general public, students, employees, vulnerable users) and applied in different domains (e.g., education, sustainable mobility, waste reduction).

StandByMe is expected to obtain the following results:

  • Schools in Italy, Hungary, Slovenia and Poland are aware of and equipped to educate and empower students to take action on human rights and gender-based violence, particularly online and offline VAWG;
  • Young people are able to recognise and are equipped to effectively react against online VAWG;
  • Young people in Italy, Hungary, Slovenia and Poland act as change agents to promote gender equality and to prevent VAWG;
  • Young people will bring to the attention of stakeholders and professionals violence detected and suggest possible counter actions to improve online and offline experience for women and girls;
  • Internet intermediaries are willing to adopt stronger human rights based mechanisms to prevent online VAWG in line with suggestions and requests from young people.

StandByMe project is funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (REC)
[101005641 — STANDBYME — REC-AG-2020 / REC-RDAP-GBV-AG-2020]

StandByMe 2.0 project is funded by the European Union’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV)
[101049386 — STANDBYME 2.0 — CERV-2021-DAPHNE]


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