Appointment of Veronica Donoso to the position of INHOPE Executive Director
02 APRIL 2015, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Summary
INHOPE is pleased to announce the appointment of Mrs Veronica Donoso to the position of INHOPE Executive Director, effective April 13th.Veronica is originally from Chile, but has lived and worked in Belgium since 2002 when she started her doctoral studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Since 2002 Veronica has carried out research about children, digital technologies and their protection online and since 2006 she has been an active member of the EU Kids Online network. Being the mother of a two-year old boy, Veronica is particularly interested in creating empowering, enriching and safe online experiences for the youngest audiences. She obtained her PhD in 2007 with a dissertation entitled: “Adolescents and the Internet: Implications for home, school and social life”.
Since 2007 she has held both academic and non-academic positions including Senior Researcher at the Center for User Experience Research of the KU Leuven, post-doctoral researcher at the Media & ICT in Organizations & Society research group of the University of Antwerp and as Project Manager at the Belgian Safer Internet Centre (Child Focus) where she was in charge of the e-safety helpline. Veronica has also acted as expert and independent consultant for several institutions dealing with the empowerment and the protection of children online including the EC, UN, UNICEF and the Word Federation of Advertisers.
In 2010, Veronica was appointed by the European Commission as the Research Coordinator of the 2nd Assessment of the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU and since 2011 she has been invited to act as independent reviewer of the EU Pledge monitoring, a self-regulatory initiative to foster responsible advertising of food and beverage towards young children in the EU. Before becoming INHOPE Executive Director, Veronica was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Law and ICT of the KU Leuven where she is currently affiliated researcher.
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About INHOPE
INHOPE is an active, collaborative and influential network of 51 hotlines in 45 countries worldwide, committed to stamping out child sexual abuse from the Internet.
INHOPE was founded in 1999 under the European Commission Safer Internet Programme.
INHOPE Hotlines offer the public a way of anonymously reporting Internet material including child sexual abuse material they suspect to be illegal.
INHOPE members operate a public hotline to receive complaints about apparent illegal content, they then assess the content in accordance with their national laws and if they consider it to be illegal they trace the material to a hosting country. If the content is illegal in the hosting country then the national Hotline takes steps to have the material ‘taken down’ in consultation with their law enforcement partners.
In the first half of 2014:
170 analysts across the INHOPE network processed 587,674 reports of illegal content.
39,144 reports were assessed to contain unique URLs of child sexual abuse material, a 32% increase compared with the last six months of 2013.
81% child victims were female. 6% child victims were infants.
In Europe, 98% was reported to law enforcement within a day. 91% was removed from the Internet within three days.
Want to know more about the work of INHOPE?
Visit our website www.inhope.org and download our 2013/14 Annual Report