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The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, including child prostitution, child pornography and other child sexual abuse material, Ms. Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, will conduct an official country visit to Bulgaria from 1 to 8 April 2019 at the invitation of the government. The objective is to assess the human rights situation under the scope of the mandate and to issue specific recommendations to improve the protection of children and their rights.

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The Council of Europe organised its first planning meeting of the steering committee for the project on Protecting children from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse in the Republic of Moldova on 23 January 2019 in Chisinau. The project aims at supporting the Republic of Moldova to effectively implement the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of children against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (the Lanzarote Convention), strengthen the state response towards child sexual exploitation and sexual abuse and promote child-friendly practices especially for the judiciary.

HELP course on Refugee and Migrant Children is created for legal and other professionals to improve their knowledge and skills. It is developed in an interactive way and includes various practical exercises through seven modules covering introduction to the legal framework, child-friendly procedures, alternatives to detention, family reunification, social rights and integration, guardianship and age assessment.

Children on the move, especially in an irregular way, remain one of the most vulnerable groups in Europe today. For instance, some 26,000 child migrants arrived in Europe in 2015 without any family. Regardless of their status and the fact that they are accompanied or not, children on the move may suffer persistent violations of their rights.

Trafficking in human beings (THB) is one of the identified crime priorities of the current EU Policy Cycle 2018-2021. This Europol report, published in October 2018, for the first time at EU level, analyses and clearly describes the features of criminal networks involved in one of the most ominous crimes of all. It is oriented towards explaining the current crime situation providing an overview of all relevant factors (OCGs, criminal markets, and geographical dimension).

The project entitled „We protect children against sexual abuse" was designed to develop high-quality educational resources for parents, educators, as well as professionals working with children and their families. It was implemented by the Empowering Children Foundation (Poland), Paramos Vaikams Center (Lithuania) and Dardedze Center (Latvia). Now ECF shares the content with interested organizations in order to prepare other language versions of the e-learning courses.

A new study by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), published in May 2018, has revealed shocking statistics on children being groomed, coerced and blackmailed into live-streaming their own sexual abuse over webcams, tablets and mobile phones.

The research, which was conducted over a three-month period from August to October 2017, identified 2,082 images and videos of live-streamed child sexual abuse. It revealed that 98% of images found were of children aged 13 and under, 28% were aged 10 or under, while the youngest victim was just three-years-old.

 

The newest (September 2018) report prepared by organization Vostok-SOS/East-SOS presents the result of a study on the situation of Ukrainian schools located within the 15-km zone along the frontline in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The project entitled „We protect children against sexual abuse" was designed to develop high-quality educational resources for parents, educators, as well as professionals working with children and their families. The e-learning provides information on how parents can talk to children about their bodies, safety, dangerous situations, to improve their protection against sexual abuse, and how to react when children face dangerous situations online and in the real world (including legal intervention).

The index compares countries by a set of indicators representing life-changing events that signal the disruption of childhood: poor health, malnutrition, exclusion from education, child labor, child marriage, early pregnancy and extreme violence. These "childhood enders" are most prevalent where poverty, conflict and gender bias overlap to create toxic environments for children.