Global Kids Online: Children′s rights in the digital age

Children’s and young people’s rights in the digital age 

IAMCR 2016 Pre-conference and Global Kids Online dissemination event (26-27 July 2016 at Shaw Library, Old Building)

Full conference programme. 

About the conference

Concerns that children’s rights are being newly infringed rather than enhanced in the digital age are often raised by researchers, child rights’ advocates, and internet governance experts. Children’s needs and experiences in the digital age are often neglected in high-level debates about global internet provision and governance and children’s rights are treated as a minority interest and seen as demanding exceptional treatment from adult society. Further, current debates frequently emphasise the risks children potentially face online and underline their right to protection but much less debate focuses on children’s provision and participation rights and the opportunities children may encounter online.

The conference sought to unpack the ways digital media intersect – both positively and negatively – with children’s rights today and to reflect on how children’s rights might provide a meaningful counterpoint from which to consider the role of ‘the digital’ in advancing human rights more broadly.

Convenors: Sonia Livingstone, Amanda Third, and Mariya Stoilova

For more details visit the conference website.

The Office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Violence against Children organised a global expert meeting on bullying and cyber-bullying, held on 9-10 May at the UNICEF-Innocenti Research Center, Florence.

Sonia Livingstone presented the Global Kids Online project at the meeting, drawing on findings from EU Kids Online and Kids Online Brazil. Among other things, these show how cyberbullying represents a growing proportion of bullying overall, as well as the value of adopting a cross-country comparative approach.

Sonia’s slides are here.

Global Kids Online at WSIS 2016

Sonia Livingstone and Jasmina Byrne presented Global Kids Online at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, May 2016, in a session entitled Children’s Rights in the Digital Age. Also presenting were Alexandre Barbosa from Cetic.br and Latin American Kids Online, Nevine Tewfik from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Egypt, and Esperanza Magpantay from the ITU. 

At stake was the fact that, although children are often celebrated as the internet pioneers or ‘digital natives’, in most countries it is not even known how many children have internet access, let alone whether its use is beneficial or harmful for them. The Global Kids Online framework offers a new and comprehensive approach to improving the evidence base for policy makers at national and international levels, in collaboration with partners worldwide.

For Sonia’s powerpoint slides, see here.

For session report, see here. 

For images, see here and here. 

For session information and all slides, see here.

For WSIS report, see here. 

LSE Department of Media and Communications convened a meeting of Global Kids Online ahead of launch of global toolkit for research on children’s digital experience.

LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti convened the second Global Kids Online network meeting at LSE on 21 and 22 March 2016. The network presented the lessons learned from international research findings on children’s internet use and developed research and policy recommendations for the launch of the toolkit in late 2016.

The meeting brought together close to 40 academics, researchers, and UNICEF staff from 14 different countries, including Argentina, Bulgaria, Ghana, India, Montenegro, the Philippines, Serbia, and South Africa, as well as representatives of the UK Home Office and WeProtect . 

You can access the report from the meeting here. For more information on this meeting see #globalkidsonline and here.

One in three: internet governance and children’s rights

As part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, authors Sonia Livingstone, John Carr and Jasmina Byrne examine whether and how internet governance supports children’s rights in the digital age. First observing that children constitute one in three people globally, and also one in three users of the internet, they then review the evidence on children’s online risks and opportunities in order to pinpoint the internet governance challenges ahead. The paper concludes with six conclusions and recommendations about how to embed recognition of children’s rights in the activities and policies of international Internet governance institutions.

Read the report, blog post and article in The Guardian

In a lecture at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2015, entitled "Children's Rights in the Digital Age: Paradoxes and Problems," Sonia Livingstone confronts unfolding debates over child rights and internet governance, with an account of the everyday messy realities of children’s lives on and offline amidst wider debates over the increasing mediation and management of identity, learning, privacy, and relationships.

18-19 September 2015: An inception meeting of the Global Kids Online project was held on 18-19 September 2015 in Florence, Italy. The meeting was hosted by UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti and brought together the international partners on the project. Participants in the meeting included members of the LSE research team, led by Prof Sonia Livingstone, staff from UNICEF Office of Research, UNICEF Country Offices participating in the research project (Argentina, the Philippines, Serbia and South Africa), their academic partners, as well as collaborators from the EU Kids Online project.

The aim of the meeting was to review the situation in participating pilot countries regarding knowledge about children’s internet use and examine best ways to gather further comparative evidence on the impact of the internet on children’s lives globally. The international partners on the project and a number of invited experts also discussed the possible methodological challenges of doing the cross-national comparative research and planned the development of a global research toolkit, building on the one developed by EU Kids Online.

7 September 2015: Inception report