How journalism inspired a youth-led initiative against online harm in Armenia

A journalist working in Armenia's Shirak Province spent years documenting migration, conflict, and inequality, only to keep running into a story that rarely made print: digital coercion disguised as intimacy, where password-sharing gets framed as trust and constant monitoring gets framed as care.

That reporting became the Shirak Digital Resilience Lab, a youth-led program bringing together 60 young people from three border towns to work through digital literacy, online rights, and how to recognize manipulation before it is normalized. The project prioritizes young women, who the reporting found carry a disproportionate share of shame and underreporting when targeted.

The piece also describes digital extortion as an underground economy of sorts, where trust is exploited and silence is maintained through fear of social consequences rather than fear of the perpetrator. Law enforcement's difficulty identifying perpetrators and preserving evidence, per the specialists interviewed, gives that silence room to grow.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.