Doing digital youth work in a P/CVE context

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Youth workers are best placed to reach young people online and to do effective digital work with them and one-on-one interventions. However, most European countries are still at the beginning of doing effective digital youth work in preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE), while practitioners often need more tools to be able to engage with young people online. Although the work is sometimes experienced as being challenging, a helpful thought can be that there is a lot of overlap in offline and digital youth work efforts, and in doing digital youth work in a P/CVE or a general context. However, digital youth work in a P/CVE context requires some specific practices.

A RAN ex-post paper explores digital youth work and the practices related to it as well as the challenges that practitioners encounter in engaging in it. It provides four key elements to be considered when planning to do digital youth work:

focusing on equipping youth workers with the right tools;

knowing your target audience and understanding their online behaviour;

taking ethical considerations and safety measures into account; and

considering an offline component.

The paper is aimed at youth workers who are planning to do or enhance their skills in digital youth work in a P/CVE context.

Source: RAN