RAYUELA (1/10/2020 – 30/9/2023) aims to bring together law enforcement agencies (LEAs), sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, legal experts, ethicists and philosophers, computer scientists and engineers, to develop a better understanding of the factors affecting the online behaviour of youngsters and how to keep them safe.

The main goal of this project is to provide LEAs, public administrations, the EU citizenship and, especially, young people and their environment (parents and educators) with valuable information and recommendations to define appropriate policies and measures to combat cybercrime.

To this end, RAYUELA will develop a serious game environment (e.g. interactive and interwoven storylines on cybercrime) to act as an enabler and amplifier of the project’s research methodology, which will allow modelling, in a friendly and non-invasive manner, online habits and user profiles related to cybersecurity and cyber criminality based on a large and diverse sample covering the most representative geographical areas in Europe.

In this way, it can be understood how to keep children safe online and how to prevent them from committing cybercriminal behaviour themselves. RAYUELA’s serious game will also have an educational purpose in addition to providing data. In other words, young people playing the game will also learn from the gameplay itself.

Our role

Timelex is in charge of the legal and ethical work in this project, which deals with a variety of legal and ethical concerns, including GDPR compliance of the game design and the piloting activities.

Research results

In addition, Timelex has carried out a study in the context of this project relating to the legal landscape of cybercrime offences committed by minors. This legal work helps to inform the scenarios in the game about the red lines to be respected by minors in the online context in order to avoid becoming a cybercriminal themselves. The study involved 21 legal experts from 19 countries (12 EU, 7 non-EU), presenting a broad array of legal perspectives.

Below you can find:

• The main study, which contains recommendations for the serious game environment, can be found below (EU flag).
• All various country reports (national flags).