TOG

There have been continuous human rights violations and sexual assaults against children in Türkiye, and the number of incidents has gone up over the years.

We created a social responsibility project that launched on World Children’s Day to create awareness about children’s rights and child abuse.

For the campaign idea, we were looking for a blanket statement that defends children’s right to express themselves as there has always been a hierarchical relationship between adults and children in Türkiye, meaning, adults always have the last say in things. 

There is even a proverb in Türkiye that goes "Hush is for children, words are for adults", which means decisions must be made by adults and children have no right to speak.

We replaced the word "hush", which means to stop talking and listening to the person in front of one, with the word "words". With such a small change, the roles of the speaker and the listener changed.

And "Words are for children, hush is for adults" campaign was born.

The star of the campaign was a video clip composed of a striking song. It was created by 9 different artists, experts among whom were comprehensive sexuality lecturers, and NGO employees.

The song wasn’t sung by a child. No children took part in the video or in any of the visuals. Because doing so would be a kind of abuse too… 

The video clip we created has been very influential in Türkiye’s public agenda since the day it was published.

• It was shared on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Spotify.

• It was voluntarily supported and reshared by many famous artists and players.

• It has found wide coverage in digital and printed media.

• Our campaign was supported prior to Darüşşafaka–Badalone Euro Cup match, our song was played on the terraces and a banner was unfurled before the game. All of these activities were broadcasted live on TV.

• The campaign was supported with training in the field. 386 Community Volunteers gave 120-minute lessons to 38,000 children in 12 different cities to raise their awareness about all the things they can do.

With all these activities, our campaign has reached over 9.1 million people in total.