In 2021, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA) launched a statewide prevention campaign addressing illegal and harmful content on students' smartphones. Officials stated that pornography, violence videos, and other problematic content were being encountered and shared by children and adolescents online and in student chat groups. The campaign was developed in response to police observations and increasing criminal cases involving the distribution of pornography, which Bavarian police reported had risen substantially in 2020. The source does not describe a single documented school incident, specific device-filtering failure, or identified school, but constitutes an official law-enforcement statement that the circulation of pornographic material on student smartphones and within youth communication channels was a recurring issue requiring preventive intervention.
FARO Directory
FARO stands for Frontline Record of Online Harms. Technology-related harm usually reaches the public one case at a time: a school in one country, a family in another, each easy to treat as an exception. This directory puts those cases side by side to help grassroots actors see where others face the same issues they do, and to help governments and regulators see the bigger picture of the harms occurring. The directory describes what its records contain. It does not measure how often these harms occur, and a country with few records may simply have little published about it.
How to use this directory: Topics are filterable for FARO reports that have already been created based on these incidents. The harms and response patterns shown are those featured there. To see the incidents used in a country-specific report, choose that country under Country report. Pick a pattern or evidence type to see on the map which countries have matching records. Click a country on the map or in the list to see its records below. Use the filter to search for keywords or specific sources.
Shaded countries have at least one record. Choose a pattern to see where it appears.
Shading shows only that a country has at least one record in this directory that matches your selection, and every shaded country looks the same on purpose. It says nothing about how often these harms occur there. Pattern filters only cover records classified so far, and small countries are easy to miss on a map, so use the list as well.
Countries
- Albania1
- Andorra1
- Argentina1
- Australia3
- Bangladesh2
- Belgium1
- Bolivia1
- Brazil5
- Canada4
- Chile1
- Colombia2
- Denmark12
- Egypt2
- Germany1
- Ghana2
- India28
- Indonesia5
- Iran3
- Ireland6
- Italy45
- Japan1
- Kazakhstan3
- Kenya33
- Malawi1
- Malaysia1
- Mexico1
- Multiple countries1
- Nepal2
- Netherlands1
- New Zealand1
- Nigeria17
- Norway8
- Not stated93
- Pakistan4
- Peru1
- Philippines10
- Portugal1
- Republic of Korea2
- Romania3
- Russian Federation3
- Singapore1
- South Africa2
- Spain6
- Sweden3
- Switzerland1
- Tanzania1
- Thailand1
- Turkey6
- Ukraine2
- United Kingdom11
- United States50
- Venezuela1
- Vietnam1
- Zambia4
- Zimbabwe12
In the list but not drawn on the map: Multiple countries, Not stated.
About the records
Each record is a short summary of an incident described in a public source or collected through an interview by SHIELD or its partners. Records are reviewed by people before they appear here. Names and identifying details are removed: where a person appears, a role, age band and gender stand in for the name, and dates and places for minors are generalised. Every record links to its original source and shows the date that link was last checked. Records are classified with shared harm categories. The classification is SHIELD's own, so it can differ from how a source describes the incident.
Using the directory
You are welcome to read, link to and quote individual records with credit to FARO. Please do not copy, scrape or republish the dataset in bulk, or use it to train or test automated systems, without written permission. To ask for permission, use the SHIELD contact form. The original sources keep their own rights, and the link on each record leads to them.
How to cite
SHIELD-APS. Frontline Record of Online Harms (FARO). DIRECTORY-URL. Accessed [date]. To cite a particular selection, use the web address shown after you set the filters.
When you rely on the facts of an incident, cite the original source it links to. When you rely on the classification, the patterns or the country report, cite FARO. Please describe the records as documented incidents and do not present counts or country coverage as how often these harms happen. A country with few records may simply have little published about it.
Corrections and removals
If a record is wrong, a link no longer works, or you are described in a record and want it changed or removed, use the SHIELD contact form and include the title of the record. We review each request and update or remove the record where the request is justified.
Report an incident
Know of a documented incident that belongs here? Send it through the incident form. A public source, such as a news report, a court or regulator decision, or a research publication, helps us verify it quickly. Submissions without a public source are kept anonymous and are not tied to named products or companies. Please leave out the names of children and of anyone who has not agreed to be named. Submissions are reviewed before anything is published, and sending one does not guarantee a record.