Gallery of avatars

We asked children what child exploitation looked like in their context, these are the stories they shared…

As part of a larger study conducted between August and November in 2023, we held co-creation sessions with 138 children and young people between the ages of 11 and 22, in 11 different countries. We asked them to complete a number of different exercises, to help us understand more about child exploitation in their contexts. One creative exercise was the creation of a a character, or ‘avatar’. We developed this method to give children a safe way to talk in-depth about how, where and why child exploitation happens, without ever putting them in the position where they need to tell their own stories or share difficult, personal information.

Each avatar is a made-up character, but with a name, a back story and something in common. All of them give us insight into the realities of children right now. A quick glance at these avatars and we see all sorts of things that should have no place in childhood – things like losing a home, violence, guns, drugs and all sorts of hard physical labour. 

In October 2023, we convened a monumental workshop, which was a chance to very thoughtfully co-design three theories of change that steer our programmatic work at TdH NL. At the centre of these discussions were the avatars and all their stories. We then wrote these theories of change into programme documents to guide us in the upcoming strategic period, as well as weaving the avatars into our global research and influencing agendas.

Check out all the avatars created by children, here…

We also transformed some original drawings from the children into animation videos. Meet our friend Lina…

Lina was created by a group of children in Cambodia. And once we had created the animation video for our launch event, with the voice of one of the children, we took Lina and a gallery of avatars back to the same children for a validation session.