Participants at a March 8 event in Zarqa, Jordan, featuring Digital Shadows.
Digital Shadows: Testing a Novel Approach to Digital Safety for Girls Across MENA
Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Digital Shadows novel is opening conversations with girls about online identity, pressure, trust, manipulation — and learning to stay safe.
The scene: a community centre in Zarqa, Jordan. As 40 girls settled into their seats, SecDev’s Lina Momani opened the evening with a simple question: how many of you use social media every day?
Nearly every hand went up.
It was International Women’s Day, during the holy month of Ramadan. The girls ranged in age from 12 to 17. They had come with their parents for an evening iftar and to learn about a new novel about digital life. Their raised hands grounded everything that followed: they were already living the world the book explores.
Meriem Noumeur signs copies of Digital Shadows at her launch event.
Released in December 2025 with IDRC support, Digital Shadows is the first Arabic novel for young readers to directly address digital safety and online harm. Written by Algerian author Dr. Meriem Narimane Noumeur, the story draws on our research on digital violence against women across the MENA region. And it does that by following three teenagers as they navigate friendship, identity, and life online.
Jouri is building a digital version of herself that is drifting away from who she really is. Her friend Leila is starting to trust someone she met online, raising difficult questions about vulnerability and manipulation. Suha’s harsh behaviour at school masks a more complicated story about hurt and online pressures spilling into everyday life. As their lives intersect, messages, images, and online interactions begin to reshape their friendships, reputations, and sense of safety.
Together with our partners in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Yemen, we are using Digital Shadows to spark conversations with young people. For many of them, digital spaces are places of connection, expression, and discovery — but they also carry new forms of pressure, manipulation, and harm. By digesting the novel together, participants can talk about those experiences through characters and situations that feel familiar, rather than through abstract warnings or technical language alone.
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Illustrations from Digital Shadows, by Meriem Noumeur.
In Zarqa, a book becomes a conversation
The Zarqa event was organized in partnership with NAYA Community Network, a Jordanian organization focused on youth empowerment. This was the session Lina Momani opened by asking 40 girls how many of them used social media every day.
For many of them, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are central to daily life — places where friendships play out, identities are explored, and social pressures can quickly intensify. After outlining the many forms digital harm can take, Lina introduced Digital Shadows’ three main characters and how they experience the digital world. The girls said they recognized elements of their own lives in the characters’ dilemmas, and many were eager to read the book for themselves.
The conversation then moved from story to lived experience. Tasmeen, a psychosocial support officer at NAYA, asked the girls to imagine opening their phone to find a cruel comment, a threatening message, or a warning that a private photo might be shared. Their responses — fear, worry, embarrassment, sadness — set up a broader exchange about the emotional effects of digital violence.
Tasmeen explained that even without visible wounds, online abuse can unravel a young person’s confidence, relationships, and sense of safety. She also explored how filters, edited images, and curated posts can fuel comparison and self-doubt — and how online manipulation often begins with trust and emotional connection.
Tasmeen and Lina offered straightforward practical guidance: do not blame yourself, do not engage with threats, keep evidence, and seek help from trusted adults or friends. They also introduced the group to support services in Jordan, including child helplines and special cybercrime and family protection units.
The evening ended with a drawing activity, as the girls reflected on the novel and their own digital lives. Their artwork captured both the pressures of online comparison and the importance of friendship, support, and resilience.
In Taiz, girls rewrite the story
On the same day, the same literary approach reached a very different setting: conflict-affected Taiz, Yemen. Wa’ed Network, under the umbrella of Sheba Youth Foundation, marked International Women’s Day with an interactive evening event titled My Safe Digital Shadow.
This event brought together 19 girls aged 12 to 20 to explore digital identity, online safety, and the realities of growing up in an increasingly connected world. Like the Jordan gathering, organizers used Digital Shadows to spark discussion about cyberbullying, fake accounts, peer pressure, and the effects of social media on girls’ self-image.
But the evening went beyond discussion. It turned the novel’s themes into something participants could question, reshape, and make their own. First the girls heard a reading from the book. Then they moved into puppet theatre scenes based on familiar online pressures — fake profiles, harassment, peer pressure — debating how they would respond. In an exercise called To My Digital Self, participants wrote letters to their online personas. Each reflected on who she wants to be, what she wants to keep private, and how she hopes to protect herself in digital spaces.
In a segment called If I Were the Heroine of Digital Shadows, the girls rewrote the story from their own perspective, drafting alternative endings and awareness messages for their peers. The evening closed around a shared art board, where each girl added a drawing or written pledge. Before leaving, every participant received a copy of the novel to take home.
The Taiz event showed the value of letting girls speak to one another in their own words about digital safety. The letters they wrote, the stories they reshaped, and the pledges they painted were not just workshop materials. They embodied young people’s own visions of what safer digital spaces could look like.
What comes next
These engagements mark the beginning of a broader regional effort to use Digital Shadows not simply as a book to be discussed, but as a way into harder conversations young people are already living — about identity, pressure, trust, manipulation, and harm online.
Lina Momani and Rania Sarayreh facilitate a recent Digital Shadows session at Al Hadarat School in Amman.
That work is already expanding. In late March, around 90 girls at Amman’s Al Hadarat School joined a Digital Shadows session led by Rania Sarayreh of the Jordanian Network to Combat Digital Violence Against Female Journalists. In the months ahead, we’ll continue working with partners to bring the novel into more schools, youth workshops, universities, and community settings.
At Jordan’s Jubilee Institute, students will explore the novel through theatrical performances and debates on digital identity, online pressure, and the blurred lines between reality and representation. The Iraqi Network for Social Media (INSM) will help university students develop their own creative and analytical responses to the novel. In Cairo, SuperWomen is planning an interactive day built around Digital Shadows, using games, competitions, and performances to help girls and young women engage with contemporary digital risks. Women of Egypt will also be awarding prizes (including a mobile data package) in a contest inviting young women to write reviews of the book.
By combining literature, conversation, and creative expression, the initiative gives young people space to explore the pressures and possibilities of digital life — and to think more clearly about how to navigate them. Creative outputs from these sessions are already being developed into public-facing materials, including a bilingual booklet, social media content, and short awareness videos. These materials help participants’ voices travel beyond the event itself and shape wider community awareness and dialogue.
That matters because the work is not only about what happens in a single room, on a single day. It is about helping young people name digital harms, reflect on them critically, and imagine safer ways of relating to one another online.
In the end, the measure of the work is not only a programme indicator. It is whether a girl in Zarqa, Taiz, or anywhere else can better name what is happening to her — and know what to do next.
