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VIDEO — 17 Apr 2026

Digital violence against children, where to get help and why bans fall short

A 24 sata interview on Televizija E about grooming and sextortion, how children can report abuse and Australia’s ban on social networks.

Televizija E
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On 24 sata on Televizija E, we talked about children’s safety online: the most common forms of digital violence, where children can get help, our institutions and social media bans like Australia’s.

The digital space is as real as the schoolyard

The host opened with the figure that one in ten children aged 12 to 17 who use the internet has experienced some form of sexual exploitation. These are worrying data: statistically, they mean several such children in more or less every larger class in Montenegro, mostly through social networks and even mobile games.

Children enter a digital space designed for adults, with no warning system, nothing adapted to their age and no systematic training, and they essentially do not know what doxing is or which types of grooming exist. We still treat the internet as safe because the child is physically in their room, although the digital space is as real as the schoolyard or the park, and in the digital world the violence does not stop when the child comes home.

The forms of digital violence in our guide

With the Centre for Civic Education I prepared an interactive guide to protection from digital violence, for young people and parents, and educational videos for the platforms children use.

The most common and most worrying forms

  • —Grooming is the gradual seduction of a minor by an adult online. The attacker usually poses as a peer, builds the child’s trust and slowly moves the boundaries towards sexual content, in the worst case to sexual abuse.
  • —Sextortion can come even from someone the child trusts or knows, such as a peer or a classmate, and even photos that are not explicit can be used for blackmail if they are private enough.

With AI, blackmailers now also use digital undressing, removing the clothes from a person in an ordinary photo to make an explicit fake for blackmail, a very serious trend that appeared recently as AI took off.

The first address is a trusted adult

In our guides we advise that the first address should be a trusted adult: a parent, teacher, school pedagogue or psychologist, or coach. A child must be able to tell them what happened without fear of punishment, because children who fear their parents’ reaction to an already traumatic experience simply stay silent, and that silence lets the abuser carry on.

In Montenegro you can turn to the police on 122, the social work centre and school teams for protection from violence, and every serious social network lets you report abuse of minors or a profile attacking you. Keep the evidence, such as screenshots and recordings of threats, extortion or conversations, because it is needed to bring the attacker to justice.

Institutions and schools have to do more

To be honest, our system is not where it should be, although we are not far behind, because this is a global problem and technology, especially AI, advances much faster than regulation. We have no specialised unit for cybercrime against children with adequate capacity. The Ministry of the Interior’s new mobile app for reporting criminal offences, including digital violence, deserves every praise. Time will show how quickly the units respond, and I am optimistic that we can even become leaders in the region against digital violence.

The NGO sector is leading this fight, above all the Centre for Civic Education and its partners, with lectures on digital violence and digital rights for young people, parents and teachers. There has to be much more institutional support, with this training in every school and all teachers trained for it. We can never rely on technology alone, because the responsibility starts with us, above all with parents, who have to teach their children to use the internet properly.

Bans are easy to bypass with a VPN

The host asked about Australia’s ban on social networks for children under 16. A ban as an isolated measure does not solve the problem, because it can only be enforced by geolocation, for example by blocking TikTok for IP addresses in Montenegro. With a VPN you appear to be in another country, and children already know these free tools from getting around other blocks, such as reaching the better content on American Netflix.

That is why a ban would have no effect at all. Education is the only measure we can implement continuously to really curb digital violence and irresponsible internet use by children, and I think all our energy should go into it and into shared responsibility.

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