The Euro-Arab Foundation leads the awareness-raising and dissemination campaign for the video game ‘Red Flag‘, designing a key action to strengthen its educational impact and its level of socio-community outreach among young people and adolescents, as potential victims of human trafficking networks, both online and offline. To this end, the Foundation collaborates with psychologist Isabel Duque, a professional who works with the virtual codes and interactive languages used in the digital spaces that minors engage with on a daily basis.
The campaign design began at the start of the year and concluded at the end of September. It consisted of identifying candidate profiles and assessing them against rigorous suitability criteria, given the high sensitivity of the subject matter and of the target audience: minors and their closest support networks. The criteria included a significant social media presence, assessed not only by number of followers but also by the size and characteristics of their digital communities, that is, by the profile of the users who trust the judgement of the person disseminating the content. In addition, profiles were required to focus their content on social justice (given the subject of human trafficking), a gender perspective (as the ‘lover boy’ method targets, and its victims are, women and girls), and the education of minors, as this is a free public-service action.
Following several months of outreach to a range of professionals, always under the coordination and supervision of the Euro-Arab Foundation, and in partnership with the German association specialised in combating human trafficking, Gemeinsam gegen Menschenhandel e.V. (GGMH), the first design phase of the prevention campaign for adolescents concluded when Isabel Duque, a psychologist better known as ‘La Psicowoman‘, agreed to collaborate with the Foundation. Ms Duque has a professional career spanning more than two decades, delivering lectures, facilitating workshops and maintaining a proactive online presence across several digital platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, which are widely used by adolescents. She is also the author of several books on emotional education and prevention, and focuses her work on in-person sessions delivered in schools and secondary education centres throughout Spain.
Finally, as a reinforcement of the ‘Red Flag’ campaign, a serious game against the recruitment of minors on social media and in their everyday lives, which remains ongoing, the collaboration with Isabel Duque took place on Monday 28 and Wednesday 30 October. It achieved more than 200 likes and over 9,200 views within three days (a figure that continues to grow), with a potential reach of nearly 82,000 followers.
