France initial lockdown meant a difficult situation for a youth protection association : During weeks, children would not be able to attend school or sports clubs where cases of child abuse are usually spotted.

Our brief was to keep in touch with all the children, while they were at home, maybe a few meters away from an abusive parent.

One of the main objectives was to make sure kids were safe without arousing suspicions of grown-ups.

We had to be discreet and surgical.

We wanted to help children who are already difficult to reach in “a normal situation” but at that moment they were trapped home.

To make it easier for them to speak up, we had to make children comfortable

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

During the Covid lockdown, we all had to stay at home. But for abused children, it also meant spending all their days with their torturers, without a way to escape or alert.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE

As the youth child protection association Enfant Bleu will always be there to help these children, we had to find new ways to reach them during these hard times.

Abused children are a micro-target particularly tough to reach. They are so young, sometimes they do not fully understand what they endure, or have difficulties speaking up. We had to make it easy and comfortable for them to speak with us. But since we were all at home, we had to create a new canal of communication.

SOLUTION

Enfant Bleu decided to infiltrate a video game they are used to : Fortnite.

Fortnite is not only the more popular video game among children, but also free-to-play on all platforms. Kids can download and play it using a PC, a console or even mobile devices.

We created an Undercover Avatar, in-game named “Enfant Bleu” .

As multiplayer video games are designed to communicate with other players, we could use both voice chat and text chat to speak with everyone adding our characters.

To do so, we had to make it known by children otherwise nobody would add in their friendlist our character, and he would have been useless.

EXECUTION

We faced another challenge, making only children aware of the character existence.

We had to make sure parents were not aware of the project otherwise some would have banned the game.

To stay discreet, we worked with micro-influencers from the gaming universe. They are followed by enormous quantity of children and are trusted by them.

Children will always rather follow instruction from someone they like then a brand or an institutional message.

Using ephemeral formats such as Instagram stories or live stream on Twitch, gaming influencers started to spread the message to their communities about the character. As these formats are automatically deleted after 24 hours, it did not leave trails on social media, and stayed secret.

Later on kids picked up the subject and begin to tell each other about the avatar to stay safe.