Digital Youth Care

Helpwanted.nl is a Dutch website for teenagers and their parents about online sexual abuse. We are collaborating with the Dutch general child helpline in order to transfer children to the most appropriate organisation. Read here how this is being done and what our experiences are.

The notes from the conference 'Online help for young people', taking place on 26 February 2013 in the Thon Hotel EU are now online and available here:

Conference notes: online help for young people (860kb, PDF)

Of course, all interventions reflect the opinion of the respective speakers, which is not necessarily the opinion of the organisers or the European Commission. Here is the agenda of the confernce:

The Ch@dvice Inventory has been developed by Artevelde Hogeschool and Child Focus in the framework of the Ch@dvice project. Is it an exploratory research into the provision of online help in Europe. In total 161 websites of social services have been screened, and around 30 in-depth interviews have been conducted with organisations taht use online counselling in their daily work. The result is an assembly of current practices, and the identification of challenges that are common to the different social services. This work has been a first step in the creation of a manual on online counselling, the Ch@dvice Guide.

The guide follows the screening of some 160 websites of counselling organisations and interviews or questionnaires with some 30 chat counselling services. The research identified some of the major challenges in chat counselling and provides a number of goof practices. The aim of the guide is to help social organisations to establish online counselling, as well on the management side as well as on the actual counselling. The guide is specifically tailored for chat counselling in cases of sexual abuse, but many of the recommendations stay true when counselling on other topics, too.