A new awareness-raising campaign “Crime is Crime. Even Online” by Victim Support Europe is designed to unite and empower national and local organisations as well as individuals who are active in the implementation of victims rights on the internet.
Using the tagline “Crime is Crime. Even Online” the new campaign relies heavily on expert videos to convey its main theme, emphasising a focus on victims’ rights online.
This time we want to encourage victims of online hate speech to reach victim support services and for victim support workers to know what to do in the aftermath of a cyber hate crime.
The objective of the campaign is twofold:
1) Through an online campaign, we aim to inform netizens of their rights when subjects of online hate, and available support services in the case of victimisation.
2) Resources produced for the online campaign will be used as part of a workshop, conducted by VSE to our member organisations, in order to train victim support professionals on how to respond to, and support, victims of online hate speech.
During the campaign period (July 21 – November 20), we want to draw attention to this theme via videos and other content materials on social media. On the campaign website https://crimeiscrime.eu we will offer not only the campaign content we produced, but also the cyber crime-related materials created by our partners in recent years. We will also literally be taking our message to the general public: on 24 September we will ‘ present the campaign at ‘Words Are Stones Final Conference’ in Brussels, on 26 September we will showcase the campaign results and poetry performances in Budapest at ‘Call It Hate Final Conference’ and, finally we will conduct the training on victims’ rights online at Victim Support Europe’s Annual Autumn Conference in Brussels in November 2019.
The campaign includes video executions, banners, poetry performances, and social media. Live poetry and video poetry component uses various targeted messages to highlight the importance of fighting online hate speech to each unique community the poets perform to: either it is a conference for policy makers or it is a poetry evening at a grassroots venue.
Social media efforts include organic outreach through the VSE’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, in addition to ‘ads for nonprofits’ placements across all three platforms.
Why this campaign so important?
VSE’s annual member survey 2018 provided strong confirmation of the notion that support frontline workers need more knowledge and skills to cope with victims of cyber hate crimes. It also became clear that victims aren’t aware of their rights on the Internet and don’t know about the existence of national victim support services that provide all kinds of assistance to victims of online hate crimes. Therefore, VSE has initiated this strategic campaign that reflects the VSE’s commitment to tackle cyber hate crime in the EU by giving people the knowledge and confidence to report it, providing appropriate training to frontline workers for them to provide proper support to victims of online hate crimes, and ensuring effective collaborative action against online hate by campaigning-in-partnership with other civil society organisations, public, business and artistic sectors.
