JoshPhilippines22

On 11 March 2016, Jan, 16, a student at St. Francis of Assisi School, and other girls, check their smart phones after classes in the Central Visayas city of Cebu, Philippines. Social media is a huge influence in children’s lives and being constantly connected to the Internet also comes with many risks, including online sexual exploitation, of adolescents and children. After the loss of her grandfather, together with the pressures of adolescent life, Jan battled depression, and was a victim of cyber-bullying. Like many adolescents s, she turned to the Internet for help. She saw a social media post about ‘cutting,’ a form of self-injury, and how the post described it as being an effective way to deal with pain and she tried to take her own life. She sought help from a UNICEF-supported programme on CyberSafety providing guidance and training in social media and she now works with UNICEF to help educate her peers about online safety.

Worldwide, children make up one-third of all Internet users. With the rapid expansion of information and communication technologies, protecting children online is an urgent global priority. Among Filipino youth, more than half regularly use the Internet on own devices with easy and unrestricted online access. The lack of awareness of online safety, along with children’s natural inquisitiveness, adolescent sexual curiosity and susceptibility to peer influence, makes children vulnerable to online violence, sexual abuse and exploitation. This can manifest itself in cyberbullying, sexual solicitation online, and victimization through child sexual abuse material and live stream child sexual abuse. Online sexual abuse and exploitation may involve both contact and non-contact offenses, and often involves subtle forms of manipulation in which a child is coerced into these situations without being able to fully comprehend what is happening to them or give informed consent. While poverty in the Philippines, and a culture of silence in re