1.1 Children’s rights in the digital age
🎯 How can the issues around children’s online protection be addressed through a rights-based approach, and why does this matter?
Discussions on child online protection often focus on the risks for children, including the worrying trends related to online child sexual abuse. The term ‘Child Online Protection’ itself places the focus squarely on the online dangers which children face. However, policies that focus exclusively on online risks can derail the internet’s potential to empower children.
A rights-based approach, which places children at the centre, balances the need to safeguard children from harm with an appreciation of the benefits of technology for children and the rights that children have in the digital age.
This is not to say that the protection of children is sidelined – far from it. Rather, the approach takes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Video 1) as the starting point, and places children’s rights at the heart of the discussion. With such approach, practitioners can focus on maximising the opportunities of the digital world for children and young people, while fostering a safe and secure online environment which keeps children’s safety and well-being protected.
Source: UNICEF Ghana
📚 Resources
It is a well established rule that the rights that people have offline must also be protected online. That includes children and their rights.
Yet, one of the main questions which practitioners have been asking is how to apply the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – a convention which entered into force in 1990, at a time when the internet was still picking up – to the digital age.
In 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s 86th session adopted a few legal instruments which serve to explain how the convention applies to the digital age:
– General comment no. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the general environment
– The explanatory notes to the general comment
– A glossary of some of the main terms used in relation to the internet, such as what ‘data minimisation’ and ‘profiling’ mean
– A child-friendly version to explain children’s rights in a way they can understand.