We collaborated with ECPAT to help inform children of their legal rights to protect them from sexual exploitation and abuse.
Helping bring the Bill of Rights poster to life as an interactive application, displaying the rights of children who have been sexually abused or exploited.
ECPAT International is a non-governmental organisation and a global network of civil society organisations dedicated to ending the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC).
After having launched the ECPAT Global Database, which was aimed at providing high-level information to the general public and policymakers, we were asked by ECPAT to help bring their Bill of Rights poster to life, which seeks to inform children of their legal rights on sexual exploitation and abuse.
- Client:
- ECPAT International
- Completion:
- Feb 2018
Objective
The ECPAT Bill of Rights originated as a poster; written with the help of children, it covers the rights that victims of sexual exploitation and abuse have, outlines how to recognise a victim, and gives information on how and where to seek help.
We were tasked with the design and implementation of a solution that would evolve upon this concept, creating an interactive application that would allow children to easily find concise and useful information appropriate to their circumstances.
The interactive Bill of Rights would offer more than the original poster, with more content it’d be informative while remaining easy to understand. It would also provide sign-posting opportunities to organisations that children could use to seek further help.
User-centred design
It was clear early on in the project that making the application easy to use and navigate for a child was of the utmost importance. Given the sensitive topic, if a child wasn’t able to quickly and easily find the information or organisations relevant to their situation, it could have severe consequences.
We led with a simple and clear concept, using illustrated icons to represent the various issues and rights throughout. With this approach, we aimed to remove as many barriers to the information as we could, which also meant that a child could gather the information they needed and leave the application as soon as possible.
The ECPAT team informed us that children were most likely to access the application on a mobile phone, with this in mind we proceeded with a mobile-first approach, ensuring that both the content hierarchy and design were suitable for mobile phone users, with progressive enhancement used to introduce design features for those with larger devices.
Safeguarding of children
The biggest issue with safeguarding is making sure that a child’s access to the Bill of Rights is private to them. A child may be visiting the application in a public environment, in a library, at home, at a friend’s house, and it is vital to them acting upon their rights that no one can coerce or intimidate them.
Within the application, we provide information on covering your tracks, including how to clear your browser cache and the use of private browsing. We also include a “Hide this page” link that will immediately redirect to Google, this link is clearly displayed and is always visible on the page.
Making information accessible
The topics this application covers are global issues, and therefore extend beyond just the English language. To make the application as accessible as possible we introduced multilingual functionality, enabling the ECPAT team to translate the information into various languages.
While working with ECPAT we learnt that users of the application may know others who could benefit from this information. We created a prominent call to action to allow children to share this website with a friend of theirs, allowing others to learn about their own rights.
We also wanted the content to be immediately accessible. To achieve this we built the application using WordPress and Vue to create a Single Page Application, all content is fetched when the page is loaded, and navigating between issues and rights is immediate, allowing the user to effortlessly and quickly gather the information they need.
The ECPAT Interactive Bill of Rights was a fantastic project to be involved with, and we were honoured to have worked with ECPAT to highlight the rights of children who have been sexually abused or exploited worldwide. The project was sponsored by the Oak Foundation and the Swedish International Development Corporation Agency (SIDA).
