Sextortion is a serious crime. And teenage boys are particularly vulnerable. Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) reports an 89% increase in Sextortion cases amongst teen boys. The goal of this
campaign was to increase awareness of sextortion in order to decrease the amount of youth falling prey to organized crime rings luring them into sending naked footage of themselves by pretending to be live girls on live platforms, and then blackmailing them for money or sexual favours.

The best way to prevent Sextortion is to be aware that it is happening. But getting teenage boys to learn about the problem isn’t easy. First of all, teens don’t want to talk about sex with their parents. Secondly, they are inundated with messages about online safety. And since many of them employ the same old scare tactics, teens can be desensitized to them. The team had to find a way to grab their attention and be memorable.

Given teen boys’ inability to connect the consequences of sharing nudes, No Fixed Address needed to raise awareness as well as provide a digital toolkit of viable alternatives they could use to change behaviour.

Since teens practically live on their phones, anything the team did also had to have the potential to become an active part of their conversation. To achieve these goals and create a strong impact, they took a very serious problem, flipped it on its head, and delivered it with humor.

To help kids avoid being Sextorted, the organization offered a simple and cheeky solution: Don’t get Sextorted, Send a Naked Mole Rat. Bearing an unfortunate resemblance (fortunate in this case) to male genitalia, the long, veiny and fleshy rodent became an easy and memorable way in into a difficult conversation.

The team used humour to appeal to teen boys, help break down the communication barriers around an embarrassing topic and de-shame the sexual nature of the problem.

The organization kicked things off with a Sextortion-Ed video featuring a cheery school teacher asking boys to send a naked mole rat instead of nudes. It followed this up with downloadable memes, gifs, stickers and a custom keyboard on the app store to get to our target right where they are, on their phones, by creating a digital toolkit that was a viable alternative to sending a nude.

In addition to their phones, teen boys also live on messaging platforms and are heavily engaged in meme culture, a behaviour the team also leveraged. Everything was housed on a comprehensive website with detailed but simple-to-comprehend information about Sextortion, along with a downloadable lesson plan for teachers and an e-commerce section with fun Naked Mole Rat swag for sale.

The campaign immediately struck a chord and was picked up by news networks across Canada and the globe. From The New Yorker to Cosmopolitan, Mashable to The Times, police forces to online news sources like BuzzFeed and AJ+, everyone was talking about the naked mole rat. Even child protection services from Australia and New Zealand tweeted their own Naked Wombats and Kiwis.

The organization tracked more than 1,000 news stories across 78 countries, social conversation about sextortion spiked 649% and there was a recorded 1.8 billion global impressions. C3P also saw a 28% increase in teen boys reaching out for help on cybertip.ca.