Empowering Armenian Youth Against Digital Violence Through Digital Resilience

• The Shirak Digital Resilience Lab engages 60 young people from border towns in Armenia to recognize and combat digital violence.
• Digital harm often disguises itself as attention or care, manifesting as forced location sharing, password control, and emotional manipulation.
• Digital violence has increasingly evolved into an underground economy built on fear, shame, and silence, particularly affecting women who fear social stigma more than the perpetrators.

Core Objectives

• Move beyond technical literacy to help youth understand power dynamics and recognize manipulative behaviors online.
• Enable participants to identify digital control before it becomes normalized in personal relationships.
• Provide a platform where youth can transform their experiences into responsible, engaging, and short-form visual content.

Methods and Impact

• Participants use AI-assisted tools and smartphones to create reels addressing taboo topics like digital extortion, misinformation, and non-consensual image sharing.
• Peer-to-peer sharing of these narratives helps break the cycle of silence by initiating public conversations in school and social networks.
• The project shifts the role of reporting from documenting consequences to preventing future harm by fostering community-led digital resilience.