In many cases, children are victims of neglect, aggression, school violence, bullying, exploitation and even sexual abuse. They often do not know where to ask for help or don’t understand the language of professionals willing to help them. Sometimes, young people who end up in court do not know their rights or don’t understand them because the legal procedures are not explained to them in their language. Artificial intelligence is ready to help.
Social workers, lawyers, psychologists, IT experts from Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania met in November 2023 in Athens in order to outline the design of an application – a chatbot – that would talk to children about their rights, not as a lawyer but as a friend. The newly created system will encourage children to ask questions and will answer with simple, clear messages tailored to their needs.
“The application will be very useful in rural areas, as usually not much information reaches them. … It is also useful because, through it, children can express their opinions”, says Leda Avgousti, project manager Terre des hommes Greece.
Children can ask simple or complex questions in their specific language, or talk about a very sensitive, personal aspect of their lives. The chatbot will identify key words and will relate them to social or legal information. The application will protect user’s identity and will delete the dialogue from its memory as soon as it is finished. All answers will be in accordance with the ethical standards and values: dignity, fairness, physical and emotional safety, transparency, non-discrimination.
The system can understand behaviours, it can identify and recognize emotions by facial expression. It will know if a child is sad, angry, happy, anxious or relaxed, and it will shape its responses so that it would make itself understood by the child.
When ready, the application will be used mainly in English, but also in other languages, as soon as legal texts entered into the database are translated.
“The new chatbot will help children navigate the legal field, which is a very complex field”, explained the specialists at the meeting in Athens. The application has a wide database behind it from which it draws its answers. “It will work on the library principle”, the IT experts from Lawren.io tell us. The child user will formulate questions and the system will search the database for the right answers and will formulate them in an appropriate, friendly language. “This chatbot is very adaptable. It can reframe answers for different age groups in different ways”, added the specialists from Lawren.io, a law and AI technology company.
The application will be tested in Romania, Greece and Bulgaria, in highschools that have offered to participate in the testing. The results will be analysed, and, based on the results, the application will be improved and refined.
This software is developed within i-Access MyRights project – artificial intelligence driven support for a smart justice with children in Europe, implemented in Romania by Terre des hommes Foundation and co-financed by the European Union.
