ECPAT is now launching its Handbook “Children as experts” – a tool for all those who conduct surveys of and with children and who are looking for new ways to collect data and include children as participants.
The handbook is based on ECPAT’s methods for surveys of children and is the result of a three-year project funded by the Swedish Inheritance Fund. The book describes how our methods have developed and the lessons we have learnt from our work.
A central theme for our method is children’s participation. We are convinced that children are experts on their own situation and must therefore play a central role when we design surveys for them. This means that children participate in all parts of our survey process – in planning, design, implementation and analysis.
To get children engaged we use story-based questionnaires in our surveys. Thanks to many options to provide open-ended responses, we have been able to create unique datasets consisting of both quantitative and qualitative data. The results from the surveys provide the basis for several of our reports. They have also provided us with important knowledge on how to respond to and support children on our helpline. In the handbook we describe how children go through all the steps in the survey and how, through an iterative approach, we have improved – and continue to improve – our methods.
It is our hope that ECPAT’s Handbook “Children as experts” can inspire others who conduct surveys of children and who are looking for ways to include children as participants in the process.
In this report we have studied children’s experiences, attitudes and strategies for dealing with sexual abuse, online and outside the internet. We have also performed a comparison of children’s responses to ECPAT Sweden’s (ECPAT) online survey “Nude Online” in 2021 and 2023. The survey has been developed and refined over time, but the questions we […]
As a parent, or if you are an adult in some other key role, being involved in children’s lives, both online and offline, is crucial for their safety and security. But it is not always easy to know how to act and talk to a child without encroaching on the child’s privacy and opportunities for […]
A report on exposure to sexual crime among children who identify as LGBTQIA+ This report is based on ECPAT Sweden’s (ECPAT) story-based survey “Nude Online” from 2022 and focuses on vulnerability to sexual crime among children who identify as LGBTQIA+, and their views on sex and relationships on the internet. Of the 6,919 children who […]
In ECPAT Sweden’s (ECPAT) work to combat the sexual exploitation of children, we have seen how an increasingly large proportion of the crimes have moved to the internet. In recent years, we have noted the emergence of a new type of crime that is largely targeted at teenage boys. It differs from the typical sexual […]