12/08/2025
🚨 Introducing HDEN: A New Lens for Safeguarding in the Digital Age
At onEvidence, we work with safeguarding professionals, researchers, and policymakers to address emerging threats, especially those that don’t yet have a name.
One of those threats is the rise of symbolic, gamified, and decentralised harm targeting children and young people online. It’s not always labelled “radicalisation,” and it rarely fits traditional models. But it’s happening – across social media, gaming platforms, messaging apps, and niche online forums.
Emergent terms like “nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE) have tried to capture this terrain, but they often prove too broad, too blunt. That’s why we’ve developed the Hybrid Decentralised Extremist Networks (HDEN) framework.
HDEN offers a diagnostic grammar for:
- Understanding how harm is cultivated through symbolism, irony, and gamified violence
- Mapping decentralised ecosystems that evade conventional disruption
- Supporting trauma-informed safeguarding responses across sectors
This framework builds on our commitment to equity, resilience, and practitioner-ready tools. It’s designed to complement, not replace, existing approaches, and to open up new conversations about safeguarding in hybridised online cultures, where symbolism, irony, and ideology collide.
📄Download the framework 🎧 Listen to the deep dive podcast https://onevidence.co.uk/hden/
Rewriting the Grammar of Modern Radicalisation: A strategic framework. Decodes symbolic harm, aesthetic radicalisation, networked coercion.