Raising Awareness About Digital Gender Violence

Expressions such as “Love Bombing,” “Gaslighting,” and “Ghosting” have become increasingly popular in both physical and digital environments. Talking about the way we interact has led people to use new terms to understand and support themselves without fear of judgment.

However, despite the progress made in the area, digital gender violence continues to persist, especially among teenagers who have not received proper education on the subject which increases the risks and dangers associated with the misuse of digital environments, which can include harassment and abuse.

To address this issue, Madrid’s City Council found an opportunity to create an atypical Valentine’s campaign that would raise awareness among the youth about abusive ideas, attitudes, and behaviours in digital environments. Our main challenge was to address such complex issue while keeping it relevant to young people using a recognizable, clear, and powerful language.

As we needed to spread awareness about this problem and show the damages it can cause. We aimed to show that these behaviours are considered penalized practices as well. We found an opportunity to approach teenagers by following the trend of “red flags,” which refers to situations that may indicate a good time to cut ties, and recognize alerts of abusive behaviours from the beginning.

When presented with a significant opportunity, we were confronted with an even greater challenge: how to approach a complex issue in a way that resonates with young people.

The city council and our team shared a common goal of increasing awareness about this issue and highlighting the harm it can cause. We aimed to show that such behaviors are considered criminal and must be reported.

To achieve this, we identified an opportunity to connect with young people by tapping into the growing trend of “red flags.” This term refers to warning signs that may indicate the need to end a relationship and recognize the early signs of abusive behavior.

How to use a trend as the voice of a movement? At least 1.5 billion views have been registered with the hashtag #RedFlags on TikTok, a platform that’s commonly used by our target audience.

Accordingly, we took a turn by taking a trend away from social media out to the streets of Madrid, encouraging young people to recognize their own red flags and freeing victims of any fault. We also aimed to reflect situations with which they could identify themselves to recognize whenever they experiment these of situations.

Our goal was to raise awareness among teens so that they could identify these behaviours and set limits, ceasing to justify situations that are commonly normalized because they are not recognized as explicit violence.

Through the use of direct text messages, we established a link with young people to detect and prevent abuse scenarios in digital environments.