Children's Rights in the Digital Age

How society can realize children’s rights in a digital age is gathering increasing attention from policy makers and researchers. Professor Sonia Livingstone is leading the Digital Futures Commission with the 5Rights Foundation to contribute to this effort. This is a new and exciting research collaboration of unique organisations that invites innovators, policy makers, regulators, academics and civil society, to unlock digital innovation in the interests of children and young people.

Sonia explains her further activities relating to children’s rights in a digital age below:

I am currently working as an expert advisor to the 5Rights Foundation and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to consult on and draft a General Comment on Child Rights in the Digital Environment (2018-2020). This built on my work as lead consultant for the Children’s Commissioner for England: Growing up digital taskforce (2017), resulting in The case for a ‘General Comment on Digital Rights’ to support the interpretation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for the digital age.

Recently I was an expert consultant to the Council of Europe’s Ad Hoc Committee for the Rights of the Child (2016-18) which produced Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)7 of the Committee of Ministers to member States on Guidelines to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of the child in the digital environment, Council of Europe. Here’s a child-friendly version.

For me, much of this work began when I organised an international workshop with UNICEF at LSE on ‘Researching children’s rights globally in the digital age’ in February 2015. We put lots of resources from that workshop on this webpage.

5 types. pic

Livingstone, S. (2020) Can we realise children’s rights in a digital world? A provocation paper. The British Academy.
Livingstone, S. (2020). Erasmus Medal Lecture 2018 AE GM Barcelona: Realizing Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment. European Review, 1-14. doi:10.1017/S106279872000054X
Livingstone, S. (2019) Claiming rights and righting wrongs: children’s rights in the digital environment. In Donohue, C. (Ed.). Exploring key issues in early childhood and technology: Evolving perspectives and innovative approaches (pp.42-48). New York: Routledge.
Lievens, E., Livingstone, S., McLaughlin, S., O’Neill, B., and Verdoodt, V. (2018). Children’s rights and digital technologies. In T. Liefaard and U. Kilkelly (Eds.), International Children’s Rights Law. Berlin: Springer, doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-3182-3_16-1.
Livingstone, S., and Third, A. (2017) Guest editor for special issue, ‘Children and young people’s rights in the digital age’. New Media & Society, 19(5).
Livingstone, S. and Third, A. (2017) Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society, 19(5): 657–670.
Livingstone, S. (2017) Children’s rights in the digital age. In Tumber, H., and Waisbord, S. (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (pp. 104-113). London: Routledge.
Livingstone, S. (2016) Reframing media effects in terms of children’s rights in the digital age. Journal of Children and Media, 10(1): 4-12.
Stoilova, M., Livingstone, S. and Kardefelt-Winther, D. (2016) Global Kids Online: researching children’s rights globally in the digital age. Global Studies of Childhood, 6(4): 455-466.
Livingstone, S., Carr, J., and Byrne, J. (2015) One in three: The task for global internet governance in addressing children’s rights. Global Commission on Internet Governance: Paper Series. London: CIGI and Chatham House.
Livingstone, S. (2015) Children’s digital rights. InterMedia, 42 (4/5): 20-24.
Livingstone, S., and Bulger, M. (2014) A global research agenda for children’s rights in the digital age. Journal of Children and Media. DOI: 10.1080/17482798.2014.961496
Livingstone, S., and O’Neill, B. (2014) Children’s rights online: challenges, dilemmas and emerging directions. In van der Hof, S., van den Berg, B., and Schermer, B. (eds), Minding Minors Wandering the Web: Regulating Online Child Safety (pp.19-38). Berlin: Springer.
And some blog posts https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/?s=livingstone+rights