🤗 Introduction
Kindly aims to end cyberbullying and make students feel safer, by leveraging the latest advances in technology and empowering children to solve this pressing challenge. Kindly is a collaboration between young innovator Gitanjali Rao, who conceived the initial proof of concept, and UNICEF, which is currently leading its development as a digital public good and exploring its implementation at scale.
💡 Motivation
Did you know that 1 in 3 children is bullied? According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, one third of the globe’s youth is bullied; this ranges from as low as 7% in Tajikistan to 74% in Samoa.
In the United States, 1 in 5 students get bullied. About 20% of students ages 12-18 experienced bullying in the United States1.
Bullying includes three core elements:
- unwanted behavior
- observed or perceived power imbalance
- repetition or high likelihood of repetition of bullying behaviors
Bullying affects all youth, including those who are bullied, those who bully others, and those who witness bullying. The effects of bullying may continue into adulthood. Among students ages 12-18 who reported being bullied at school during the school year in the United States, 15% were bullied online or by text1.
🎯 Goals
Within the next 3 months, we aim to:
- Create a public API in an open-source environment, making it easier and more accessible for other technical users to contribute to
- Develop it as a digital public good, opening up the training data sets and machine learning model to encourage wide collaboration
- Build an open-source community around it, empowering youth around the world to collaborate in tackling cyberbullying
- Raise greater awareness around cyberbullying