Child Online Violence: Understanding the Landscape in MENA
A 90-minute Maestral International learning webinar on technology-facilitated violence against children across the Middle East and North Africa, with panelists from UNDP, the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, AugentisAI, and the Center for Civilians in Conflict. My segment, “The Role of AI-Facilitated Violence Against Children in MENA,” makes the case that AI did not invent this violence; it changed the economics of it. Producing sexual imagery of a child no longer requires access to a child, work that once took days now takes a single prompt, and the material being generated is becoming more severe rather than less. I go through what the front-line monitoring organizations have recorded since 2023, why the stakes run higher in this region – where an image need not be explicit to be weaponized against a girl, and where Arabic-language moderation, reporting hotlines, and legal definitions lag well behind the threat – and what governments, companies, and NGOs can do now. The evidence base is the child-centered framework on technology-facilitated gender-based violence I led at Save the Children, built with 219 children aged 9 to 17 across five countries, including Egypt.
Panel: Najia Hashemee (Advisor, Democratic Institutions and Processes in the Digital Era, UNDP); Souzan Mohareb (Co-Founder, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Head of the Aid Department, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development); Maher Al-Khaiyat (Co-Founder and CEO, AugentisAI); and Vanja Kovac Ström (Senior Gender, Inclusion and Child Protection Advisor, Center for Civilians in Conflict). | Organized by Leonora Borg and Eman Ismail (Maestral International).
