Project

Child sexual abuse and exploitation are among the worst forms of violence against children and constitute serious crimes that know no borders. The continuous increase in child sexual abuse and exploitation, not least due to the Covid‐19 pandemic, highlight the importance of harmonised national legislation and international cooperation to prevent these offenses, protect the victims and prosecute the perpetrators. The fight against these awful crimes is a global fight that involves governments, law enforcement agencies, civil society, communities, and, of course, companies.

ALUNA project proposes an innovative, ambitious, interdisciplinary, international child-protection-centered approach to fight against CSA/CSE crimes. ALUNA focuses on the three main components (Prevention, Investigation, and Victim Assistance) to establish a coordinated contribution with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) by developing an appropriate approach that is capable of addressing specific needs and providing protection to childhood. The ALUNA project’s main objective is to use technology to improve the way in which help and support can be provided to victims of CSA/CSE. Moreover, the ALUNA project will establish new innovative strategies that in the short, medium, and long term will improve the way in which LEAs and civil society organisations (CSOs) carry out criminal investigations, assist rescued victims, and prevent the occurrence of these crimes.

ALUNA project’s solutions will have a worldwide effect, thanks to the participation of LEAs and organisations from around the world, which bring their expertise to our project, to develop useful solutions that are suitable for each stakeholder and the general public, in a way that is appropriate to all of the different backgrounds involved. Our project will put a lot of emphasis on the field of prevention aimed at the general public by carrying out information and prevention campaigns throughout the duration of ALUNA, which will include workshops and conferences for the wider public.

Acronym

ALUNA

Number of Project

101084929

Title

Child protection centred strategies to fight against sexual abuse and exploitation

Funder

European Commission, Internal Security Fund (ISF)

Type of Action

ISF-PJG

code

ISF-2021-TF1-AG-CYBER

Number of Partners

Number of countries

Partners Type

3 Univ | 1 SMEs | 3 RTO | 5 LEAs | 4 NGOs

Total Grant

3,599,886 €

Start Date

01-06-2023

End Date

31-05-2025

OBJECTIVES

PREVENTION

To provide a variety of preventive measures to reduce CSA/CSE crimes.
To reduce the risk of (re-)offending by better understanding the behaviour of abusers and potential abusers.

INVESTIGATION

To analyse possible involvement of organised crime groups implicated in CSA/CSE in other crimes.
To develop new approaches to investigate CSA/CSE crimes.
To address new threats of child abuse and coercion and extortion of victims that have escalated in the last years.
To develop new protocols to facilitate collaboration and interoperability between investigators from any European country, and due to the importance of the subject, between LEAs investigators around the world.

victim assistance

Develop a set of holistic measures to ensure adequate CSA/CSE victims' protection and assistance.
To develop new approaches to mitigate the impact on victims of CSA/CSE and to reduce re-victimisation in the short and long term.

WORK PACKAGES (WP)

Project management and coordination

This WP runs all along the project lifetime, to ensure a successful completion of the project goals on time, within budget and with quality standards.

Best-practices specifications, requirements and use cases definition

This WP aims to provide an overview and status quo assessment of the mechanisms used by the multi-stakeholder to prevent, investigate and mitigate CSA/CSE investigations gathering and presenting relevant best practices that could be integrated into a Common European Framework governing this field.

Privacy, ethical data management and social impact assessment

Ensure that the developed platform and analytics tools comply with the European societal values, fundamental rights and applicable legislation including the privacy and protection of personal data.

Strategies and tools to strengthen the investigation and prosecutions processes and enhance multi-stakeholder cooperation

The general objectives of this work package are: Use the latest state-of-the-art to develop a set of tools to reinforce the LEAs research filter CSAM/CSEM and provide complementary functionalities such as: forgery detection, identification of source camera and metadata analysis.

Multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary child-protection strategies to strengthen prevention and victim assistance programs

The main objective of this work package is: Develop a toolkit for the comprehensive care of victims of CSA/CSE.

Test cases implementation and validation

Validate the tools and results will be carried out through a number of pilot-cases to be conducted at EU and Latin-American LEAs level to validate the technologies developed in the real environment.