Online Safety in the Pacific: A Report on a Living Lab in Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands

With cable internet systems rolling out across the Pacific, access to affordable and fast digital connectivity in the region is set to rapidly expand, opening up unprecedented opportunities for children but also potentially exposing them to new risks of harm. Child online safety in the Pacific region thus stands at a critical juncture. However, there is very little rigorous and reliable evidence to guide policy and decision making in relation to children’s digital practices and online safety This report presents the key findings of research undertaken to map the challenges and opportunities that technology presents for children in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea. The project deployed a qualitative, participatory research methodology developed by the Young and Resilient Research Centre and previously deployed in over 70 countries. From December 2019 to March 2020, the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University, ChildFund Australia and Plan International Australia conducted half-day creative workshops conducted separately with 96 children aged 10-18; 58 parents and carers; and 50 representatives of government departments, local and international NGOs, schools, police, telecommunications companies, religious organisations and community leaders. Workshop activities explored key themes relating to each group’s perceptions and experiences of children’s digital media use and online safety, with the overall aim of generating an evidence base for ChildFund Australia’s and Plan International Australia’s future child protection programming in the Pacific region. Activities included writing, discussion, polls, and arts-based tools. Participants were engaged individually, in small groups, and as a whole group. Overall, despite different cultural practices and contexts at play in the three countries that participated in the study, across the sample, there were remarkable similarities in children’s, parents’/carers’ and other adult stakeholders’ experiences of navigating online safety issues for and with children

Online Safety Perceptions, Needs, and Expectations of Young People in Southeast Asia: Consultations with Young People in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam

Globally, children and young people's access to digital devices and online spaces are fundamental to what it means to be a young person in the contemporary context. Young people's access to digital technology earlier in life, and in greater numbers, has resulted in increased societal awareness and concern about ensuring their safety and wellbeing online. One manifestation of that concern is through calls for online platforms to take greater responsibility for safeguarding users' privacy and wellbeing. A growing body of work asserts the importance of technology industries adopting a human-centric approach when designing their online platforms and services to ensure those products are safer for the people who use them. In Southeast Asia in particular, penetration and use of online technologies among young people is rapidly advancing. It follows then that young people in this region should be included in discourses about and practices for online safety. This report describes outcomes of a project that explored online experiences of children and young people in four countries in Southeast Asia - Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam - showing how young people in these countries perceive and experience key elements of their lives online. The report also presents young participants' ideas and aspirations about how to ensure they and their peers remain safe online, reinforcing the value of such ideas for key stakeholders when planning, developing, and operationalising their online products and services

Child-centred Indicators for Violence Prevention: Summary Report on a Living Lab in the City of Valenzuela, Philippines

In 2015, world leaders made a commitment to end all forms of violence against children by 2030, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To achieve the aspirations of the SDG global targets, Governments set targets, taking into account national circumstances, to reduce children’s risk and be responsive to local contexts. Prevention and response efforts need to be grounded in the best available evidence to achieve measurable reductions in violence, and if the needs of children are to be foregrounded, strategies to end violence must respect not only children’s protection rights but also their participation rights. Moreover, it is critical that the processes for monitoring and measuring impacts centre children’s needs, aspirations and experiences. If children themselves report that violence is reducing in their personal lives, in their communities and in their countries, we will know that efforts to address violence, abuse and neglect are succeeding. This report describes a project undertaken in collaboration with End Violence, the City of Valenzuela, the Young and Resilient Research Centre and other partners to develop child-centred indicators for violence prevention in the City of Valenzuela in greater Manila, Philippines. Child and adult stakeholders worked together in a series of 14 participatory workshops to creatively explore children’s experiences and perceptions of violence, to map their aspirations for change, to ideate strategies for addressing violence in their communities, and to develop child-centred indicators against which violence reduction can be measured. This project found that children’s perspectives are a vital resource for efforts to localise INSPIRE strategies and that the deployment of child-centred indicators usefully augments and complements the INSPIRE measurement framework. Beyond the City of Valenzuela, there is opportunity to scale the use of these child-centred indicators to other parts of the Philippines and globally. The report also offers reflections on the key strengths and limitations of the Living Lab process for engaging a wide range of stakeholders, including children themselves, in the project of ending violence against children

Fix My Food: Children's Views on Transforming Food Systems

Sustainable food systems are critical to ensuring that all children and adolescents are able to access nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable foods. However, current food systems are failing children and adolescents. Globally, two out of three young children do not consume a diet of minimal diversity and three in four adolescents in low-income and middle-income countries do not consume enough fruit and vegetables. At the same time, in the same settings, children and adolescents often have ready access to cheap, nutrient-poor processed and ultra-processed foods. Urgent action to radically transform food systems and deliver on children’s right to good nutrition is needed. UNICEF partnered with the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University to bring the voices of children to the forefront through participatory food systems dialogues in 18 countries around the world. Over 700 children and adolescents aged 10-19 from significantly diverse backgrounds participated in two-and-a-half-hour workshops to share their lived experiences, insights, and perspectives on food systems. The workshops help understand children’s views and perspectives on food systems; the key challenges to attaining nutritious, safe, desirable, and sustainable food; and how children want food systems to change. Additionally, UNICEF conducted U-Report polls involving 22,561 children and youth in 23 countries who reported on their experiences of food systems and food environments. Workshop findings exposed how children are knowledgeable about the importance of food and what it means to them and their communities. They understand how food is produced and how it travels from farm to mouth. They are clear about the main barriers – physical and financial – to nutritious, safe, and sustainable diets and are concerned about the links between current food systems, environmental degradation, and climate change. U-Report data demonstrated that cost and safety of food (32%) followed by taste (25%) were the biggest influence on food choice. During workshop activities children expressed a strong desire to be engaged in dialogue and action to transform their food systems and to address food poverty, food quality, environmental degradation, and climate change. Children voiced two key recommendations to aid food system transformation 1) improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods; and 2) reduce the impact of food systems on environmental degradation and climate change. Children call on political leaders and public/private-sector stakeholders to work across all levels of society to strengthen food systems; from implementing effective regulation of food industries to promoting individual and community behaviour change. Doing so will support people to sustain themselves while also sustaining the environment. Children call on governments and other stakeholders to work with them during this process to create platforms for their ongoing participation in the process of food systems transformation

DIE AREALE DER IKAVISCHEN, EKAVISCHEN UND IJEKAVISCHEN MUNDARTEN IM SLAVONISCHEN DIALEKT

Der Author hat in diesem Artikel die Areale aller Mundarten des slavonisehen Dialekts in Detail dargestellt und auch eine Karte hinzugefügt wo man die Grenzen der besprechenden Mundarten sehen kann

Participation, empowerment and democracy : engaging with young people's views

This chapter explores new and emergent discourses and practices of youth participation, from within and beyond the field of youth work, and considers some of their unintended consequences. While youth participation means different things and is practised in diverse ways around the world, this chapter considers predominantly the ways participation has been conceptualised and practised in western, Anglophone democracies – specifically Australia where the debates have been rich and diverse. For more than four decades, Australian youth movements, advocacy and non-government organisations, youth workers and researchers have developed and promoted diverse approaches to participation (Collin, 2015) and Australian governments have actively proscribed policy to shape young citizen practices (Bessant, 2004; White and Wyn, 2004). The Australian focus, therefore, is a means by which to explore more general questions about the prospects for youth participation to enhance both the agency and recognition of young people as well as transform political processes and institutions

Project Rockit Online: Evaluation Report

In 2014, PROJECT ROCKIT was awarded funding from the Telstra Foundation to develop a new online anti-bullying and leadership program for use in Australian schools. The program comprises three 20-minute online workshops. Each workshop is hosted by a young presenter, and includes stories and vignettes of bullying told through audio, video and various graphics. This evaluation report presents findings from semi-structured interviews held with ten Year 7 students from a regional New South Wales school that participated in the PROJECT ROCKIT Online pilot. Interview questions were based around the following four themes: impacts on, and outcomes for, students who participate in PROJECT ROCKIT online; contexts in which young people encounter online and offline bullying; how well young people think their parents and teachers are prepared to support them in dealing with issues of online and offline bullying; and young people's observations of their peers in bullying situations

The role of online social identity in the relationship between alcohol-related content on social networking sites and adolescent alcohol use

Social networking sites (SNSs) are social platforms that facilitate communication. For adolescents, peers play a crucial role in constructing the self online through displays of group norms on SNSs. The current study investigated the role of online social identity (OSI) in the relationship between adolescent exposure to alcoholrelated content posted by peers on SNSs and alcohol use. In a sample (N= 929) of Australian adolescents (Age M= 17.25, SD = 0.31) higher levels of exposure to alcohol-related content on SNSs was associated with higher levels of alcohol use. Importantly, the association was stronger when the participants reported higher OSI particularly when also reporting low or moderate amount of time spent on SNS. The findings can be explained by social identity literature that demonstrates individuals align their behaviors with other members of their social group to demonstrate, enact, and maintain social identity. The results of this study reflect the importance of considering the construction of the ‘‘self’’ through online and offline constructs

Education and social participation : civic identity and civic action in formal and informal education contexts

In this chapter, we argue that the development of civic identity through education is a social achievement. When opinions about how the world should be are experienced as social identity (‘we’) rather than as personal identity (‘me’), then they gain increased power to bring about change (see McGarty, Lala and Thomas, 2012; Smith, Thomas and McGarty, 2015). We describe empirical work showing that people can come to a new understanding of themselves (identity) and the civic world that they live in (participation) through structured group interaction or discussion (Thomas and McGarty, 2009); Thomas, McGarty and Mavor, 2009; Thomas, Smith, McGarty and Postmes, 2010; see also Campbell, 2008). Other work shows social identity transformation through an intervention where university students learn to oppose everyday racism (Pedersen, Paradies, Hartley and Dunn, 2011). Finally, we discuss how providing support for people recovering from severe trauma (genocide survivors) precipitates identity change and promotes global civic engagement (McGarty et al., 2012)

Creating Benefit for All: Young People, Engagement and Public Policy

Young people’s participation in the economic, political and cultural life of all Australians is fundamental both now and in the future. Their participation contributes to healthier, happier individuals and communities, and a stronger, more resilient democracy capable of responding effectively to complex challenges such as mental health, environmental and economic change. New forms of participation and collaboration - especially via digital media technologies - offer real opportunity to embed diversity in young people’s participation in government and community decision making. However, at the federal level, young people are more marginalised from formal policy processes than ever before. In 2016 there is no Ministerial responsibility for youth, limited cross- government consideration of youth perspectives and initiatives to promote young people’s contributions and advocate for their interests, such as National Youth Week and the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, have been de-funded. Dominant policy approaches to youth engagement focus on their participation ‘in’ education, employment and training. These policies are often aimed at remedying perceived deficits or deterring them from ‘anti-social’ alternatives. Youth enterprise and leadership are also celebrated and occasionally supported by government, not all young people have equitable access to such opportunities. Others wish to act and be recognised in other ways. Moreover, there is a lack of data on young people’s and policy makers’ views regarding involvement in policy processes which could inform a national framework that puts young people at the centre of public policy