Page to Stage: Youth Novel About Digital Dangers Inspires Theatre and Debate

This group of Jordanian students didn’t just read Meriem Noumeur’s story of online identity, pressure, and harm: they performed it, argued over it, and made it their own through art and dialogue.

Meriem Noumeur signs copies of Digital Shadows last December.

The scene: a stage at Jubilee Institute, a state-of-the-art high school in Amman. A teenager sits alone, phone in hand. Around him, the hall fills with motion and sound. Then the shadows start to move.

So began Lasna Thilalan: We Are Not Shadows — a student-led theatrical adaptation of Meriem Noumeur’s Digital Shadows. That’s the Arabic youth novel that has been sparking conversations with girls across the MENA region about online identity, manipulation, and safety.

This May 17 event did not unfold as a lecture on the risks of social media. It unfolded as a play, a debate, an art exhibit, and a long conversation where the students were not the audience. They were the ones asking the questions, testing the arguments, and deciding what the story meant to them.

A novel, a school, and a day of their own

Shadows on the wall: a student art exhibit set the tone for the day.

The educational day was organized by the SecDev Foundation’s Salam@ team in partnership with Jubilee Institute and King Hussein Foundation, with support from the International Development Research Centre. From the start, the students saw that this wouldn’t be a traditional school awareness session. Rather than experts speaking to students, students would lead — through creative arts, debate, and reflection. Experts were there to walk alongside them.

The morning opened with a tour of a student art exhibit inspired by the novel. Paintings lined the walls: faces split between filtered perfection and more uncertain expressions; figures alone behind screens; silhouettes reaching outward. Before a word was spoken, the exhibit was expressing what many of these students see and feel in their own digital lives.

Opening remarks from Dr. Adel Tweissi, former Minister of Education and Higher Education.

Next, SecDev’s Lina Momani introduced the regional research on digital violence against women that informed Digital Shadows. She explained why the team had wanted to turn that research into a story teens could read in their own language. She also introduced their ecosystem approach: responding to online harm cannot rest on awareness alone. It needs education, mental health, law, media, civil society, and the arts to move together.

Dr. Adel Tweissi, a former minister of education, delivered a keynote. He called the day a model of what twenty-first century education can look like — when a novel becomes a platform for critical thinking and we trust students to do more than memorize.

A psychiatrist, a lawyer, and a room full of teenagers

Waiting for the panel to begin.

Next, a panel discussion offered one last opportunity for framing commentary. The facilitator was Dr. Rana Dajani, molecular biologist and founder of the We Love Reading movement. Joining her were Dr. Ashraf Salhi, psychiatrist and Jubilee alumnus, and Dr. Ayman Halasa, legal expert and Director at the Information and Research Center – King Hussein Foundation.

Dr. Salhi explored what Digital Shadows shows about how online harm lodges itself inside an adolescent. He used the novel’s characters as case studies. Jouri’s growing dependence on filters is a window onto distorted self-image and “identity strain.” Leila’s collapse illustrates what psychologists call learned helplessness — when a teenager stops believing they can change what is happening to them. He explained why online harm can bite harder than schoolyard bullying. The schoolyard has boundaries. The phone does not. Even the bedroom is no refuge when the threat sits on the bedside table.

Panelists: Dr. Ashraf Salhi, Dr. Rana Dajani, and Dr. Ayman Halasa.

Dr. Halasa brought the legal dimension. He explained that defamation, blackmail, image manipulation, and misuse of private information are not just unkind. They are punishable under Jordanian law. He returned to a point that matters in any conversation with a young person who has been targeted online. Even if a victim willingly shared images or information, the law does not assign them blame. He also drew a line that some students were clearly thinking about — between criticism of public officials or institutions, which the law protects, and personal attacks that cross into defamation.

Dr. Dajani held the thread between the two. Adolescents should not be reduced to their mistakes, she said more than once. They should be listened to.

We Are Not Shadows

From the students’ performance of Lasna Thilalan: We Are Not Shadows.

Then the students took the stage. The play opened with the teenager and the phone. As shadows gathered around him, four characters from Digital Shadows stepped forward in turn.

Jouri carried a frame in her hands — a filter made literal. She projected confidence when she held it to her face. Without it, she became uncertain, anxious, smaller. Her dialogue with the narrator asked what it costs to live behind a mask. Where is the line  between wanting to grow and erasing yourself?

Leila and Imad acted out an online relationship that begins in loneliness and ends in betrayal. We are not here to judge who hurt whom, the narrator said. We are here to understand how a young person loses herself in filling a hole nobody helped her name. Leila knelt on the stage trying to repair a paper heart. She tried alone, and it fell in pieces. Then a mother stepped out from the shadows, held the heart in place, and told her that healing is hard but possible.

The narrator pulls the threads together.

Suha came last, grasping a magnifying glass, hunting for truth. She represented a recurring question: Is truth the same thing as exposure? The answer, delivered with the steadiness of teenagers who had clearly thought about it, was no. Truth that humiliates, the narrator said, is no longer truth. The people who can hold truth are the people who can also hold privacy.

The play closed with a narration delivered directly to teenagers in the room — to those who live more easily inside their screens than outside, whose feeds move faster than their lives. They are not alone. They are seen. There is a way back from the shadows.

When the students judge

After the play came the debate. The motion: This house believes that social media platforms constitute a real threat to adolescents’ identity.

The proposition team argued that the threat is neither abstract nor imagined, drawing on insight from the novel. They built on the psychology that Dr. Salhi had laid out: filters distorting self-image, the corrosive logic of comparison, online attention curdling into harm. Their sharpest point: an identity formed in the company of an algorithm that rewards performance is not the same as an identity formed in the company of people who actually know you.

The opposition team — arguing that social media is not, in itself, a threat — defined their terms carefully. They distinguished between the platforms, the long process of identity formation through family and school and community, and what should actually count as a real threat. They grounded their case in peer-reviewed research and international health guidance. Their sharpest argument: instead of protecting teens, banning social media pushes its use into the shadows, where families cannot see and cannot help.

Both teams were careful and well-prepared. And the most striking part was who decided who “won.”

The judging panel was made up entirely of trained students. They scored teams on clarity of argument, quality of evidence, depth of analysis, response to opposing points, teamwork, and persuasion. The students who debated, and the students who judged, were both being trusted with the same thing: the assumption that they could bring rigour to a complex question, and  arrive at a defensible conclusion. And that trust was the foundation for the whole day.

A conversation, not a lecture

The day closed with an open discussion about the novel and its characters.

Students dismantled and rebuilt the story in real time. They argued that Jouri and Leila were not running away from reality into the internet — they were searching for a space to express themselves, to belong, and to compensate for emotional or social gaps in their offline lives.

Several linked the absence of safe dialogue at home to the pull of online attention. They asked whether online relationships can be as genuine and meaningful as offline ones. They asked what makes a girl feel safe enough to ask for help. They didn’t always agree.

One of the strongest threads was a refusal to reduce the characters to their mistakes. Students distinguished, again and again, between judging a behaviour and judging a person. They argued for choosing empathy over blame — for understanding the circumstances behind a person’s choices.

The room felt less like a school event and more like a space where young people could think out loud about the pressures, relationships, and uncertainties shaping their lives.

The adults in the room answered questions when asked. But mostly, they listened — the academics, the lawyers, the writers, the social development consultants, the women’s rights advocates, the alumni. Many stayed afterwards. Many asked what comes next, and how they could be part of it.

A wider audience

A Jubilee student speaks to Jordan TV.

Three days before the event, Lina Momani spoke with Radio Al-Balad / Amman Net about SecDev’s work on digital violence, the origins of Digital Shadows, and the educational day taking shape at Jubilee Institute. The interview ran under the headline Digital Violence Expert: A Silent Threat to Youth, and Asking for Help Is Not Weakness. It highlighted two ideas that would recur during the day: that online harm is a less visible but real threat for young people, and that asking for help should never be read as weakness.

The day drew participation from Jordan’s Ministry of Education. Dr. Mazen Al-Hudayris, Director of Education for the University District (Liwa Al-Jami’a) attended alongside Zaid Al-Kayed, head of the directorate’s educational activities department, and Dr. Mohammad Bazbaz, head of its media office. Dr. Al-Hudayris emphasized the importance of helping students navigate digital challenges through critical thinking, constructive dialogue, and creative engagement. The directorate documented the day on its official channels. Jordan TV also covered the event in a 12-minute feature report.

What comes next

Visualizing online pressures: some of the student art on display.

Earlier this spring, a small group of girls in Zarqa sat with Digital Shadows during a Ramadan gathering and talked about what they recognized in it. In Taiz, 19 more were handed pens and asked to rewrite the ending in their own words. In Amman, the Jubilee  event added another dimension to that conversation: performance, debate, and student-led interpretation.

What set this day apart was how seriously students took up difficult questions about identity, pressure, privacy, and support online. They were not simply repeating an adult message back to the room. They were working through those questions in their own language — through theatre, disagreement, humour, vulnerability, and debate.

Lina Momani: a young leader who’s been with the Salam@ team from the start.

In the months ahead, Salam@ and its partners will continue bringing Digital Shadows into schools, universities, and youth spaces across Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen. The novel travels because its questions travel — questions about identity, about being seen, about the costs of living inside a screen. Creative outputs from these sessions will help shape future public engagement and awareness efforts.

The goal is not to turn every student into an expert on digital safety. It is to make online harm easier to recognize, easier to name, and easier to bring into the open — so fewer and fewer young people are facing it alone in the shadows.

The debate teams pause for a group photo with Nart Dohjoka, Jubilee’s Head of Development and International Relations.