Children's Rights and the Digital Environment

Children's rights in the digital environment means that all the rights a child has offline (to safety, privacy, education, play, free expression and being heard) also apply online. Children today use phones, games, social media and video apps from a very young age. This brings great benefits but also serious risks, such as abuse, bullying, addiction and misuse of their personal data. The idea asks governments, companies and parents to make the internet safe for children without simply shutting them out of it.

Why does it matter?

Roughly one in three internet users worldwide is a child, according to UNICEF estimates. A child cannot judge risk the way an adult can. A stranger can pretend to be a friend online; a game can be designed to keep a child playing for hours; an app can quietly collect a child's location. Laws written for the offline world often do not cover these risks. So countries have started making special rules for children online.

Where did it come from?

The base is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 1989, which almost every country has joined. India ratified it in 1992. It was written before the internet became common. Key articles include:

• Article 3: the "best interests of the child" must be a main consideration in all decisions affecting children.
• Article 12: the child's right to be heard.
• Article 16: the right to privacy.
• Article 17: access to information from the media, with protection from harmful material.
• Articles 19 and 34: protection from all forms of violence and from sexual exploitation and abuse.

The Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (2000) asked countries to make producing and spreading child sexual material a crime. India ratified it in 2005. In 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comment No. 25, which explains how every UNCRC right applies in the digital environment. A "general comment" is an official guide on how to read the treaty; it is not a new treaty.

The three kinds of online risk

Experts group online dangers into a few types, sometimes called the "4 Cs":

• Content: a child sees harmful material (violence, sexual content, self-harm).
• Contact: an adult contacts the child to harm them, for example grooming (building trust to sexually exploit a child later).
• Conduct: children's own behaviour, such as cyberbullying or sharing private images.
• Contract (commercial) risks: data collection, targeted ads, gambling-like features in games.

How do countries protect children online?

There are four main tools:

1. Criminal law: making it a crime to make, share or keep child sexual abuse material, and to groom children.
2. Platform duties: making companies detect, remove and report harmful content, and design safer products ("safety by design"). For example, default private accounts for children.
3. Data protection: stopping companies from tracking children or showing them targeted ads, and requiring a parent's permission.
4. Age limits: stopping children below a certain age from opening accounts.

How does detection and reporting work?

Most large platforms use hash-matching. Each known abuse image is turned into a unique digital fingerprint (a "hash"). When someone uploads a picture, its fingerprint is compared with a database. If it matches, the platform blocks it and reports it. In the United States, platforms must report such material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) through its CyberTipline.

NCMEC passes tips about India to Indian authorities: the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) signed an agreement with NCMEC in 2019 to receive these reports, which are then sent to state police through the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. Indian courts have said this indirect route does not replace the duty to inform Indian police directly.

India's legal framework

• Article 15(3) of the Constitution lets the State make special provisions for children; Article 21A gives the right to education; Article 39(e) and (f) (Directive Principles) ask the State to protect children from abuse and exploitation.
• POCSO Act, 2012: punishes sexual offences against children, including using children for sexual material (Section 14) and storing it (Section 15); duty to report (Section 19).
• IT Act, 2000, Section 67B: punishes publishing, transmitting, creating or browsing sexually explicit material involving children online. Punishment is up to 5 years for a first conviction and up to 7 years for a repeat.
• IT Rules, 2021: platforms must warn users against posting content harmful to children, remove unlawful content, and large platforms must try to detect child abuse material proactively.
• Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, Section 9: a child is anyone below 18. Companies need verifiable consent of a parent before processing a child's data. They must not do tracking, behavioural monitoring or targeted advertising aimed at children, or any processing likely to harm a child. The DPDP Rules, 2025 (notified in November 2025, Rule 10) explain how parental consent is verified. Most of these duties come into force 18 months after the Rules were notified.
• Cybercrime reporting: citizens can report child abuse material on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (cybercrime.gov.in), and anonymously.

How do other countries do it?

• United States: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 1998, needs parental consent for collecting data of children under 13. That is why many apps set 13 as the minimum age.
• United Kingdom: the Online Safety Act, 2023 puts legal duties on platforms to protect children, enforced by the regulator Ofcom. Child-safety duties, including strong age checks for harmful content, began in July 2025.
• Australia: a 2024 amendment to its Online Safety Act requires major social media platforms to stop under-16s from holding accounts, from 10 December 2025, with fines of up to AUD 49.5 million.
• European Union: the Digital Services Act requires a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors on online platforms.

Commonly confused concepts

• CSEAM vs "child pornography": they refer to the same kind of material, but "pornography" suggests consent and adult content. A child cannot consent, so the material is always a record of abuse. That is why the Supreme Court (2024) asked for the term CSEAM.
• Age of a child: POCSO and DPDP vs COPPA: in India, both POCSO and the DPDP Act treat anyone below 18 as a child. The US COPPA protects only under-13s.
• Section 67B of the IT Act vs Section 15 of POCSO: 67B is about online publishing, transmitting and browsing; Section 15 is about storing and possessing, including failing to delete or report.
• NCMEC vs NCRB: NCMEC is a US non-profit that receives reports from US-based platforms; NCRB is India's government body for crime data that receives NCMEC's India-related tips.
• General Comment vs Optional Protocol: an Optional Protocol is a legally binding add-on treaty that countries must ratify; a General Comment is guidance from the UN committee and is not separately ratified.

Issues, criticism and the way forward

• Delays in action: reports go first to a foreign body and then back to India, which can delay rescue of the child and arrest of the offender. Evidence such as IP logs may be deleted by then.
• Privacy vs safety: scanning private messages for abuse material can weaken end-to-end encryption (where only the sender and receiver can read messages). Privacy groups say this puts everyone at risk; child-safety groups say platforms must not become safe spaces for abusers.
• Age checks are hard: checking age may require ID documents or face scans, which raises privacy concerns. Children also find ways around bans.
• Bans vs empowerment: some experts and General Comment No. 25 itself stress that children also have rights to information, play and expression online; blanket bans may push them to less safe corners of the internet.
• AI-generated abuse material: new AI tools can create fake abuse images, which old laws may not clearly cover.
• Low awareness: many parents and teachers do not know how to report such content or how to talk to children about online safety. The Supreme Court in 2024 also stressed the need for age-appropriate sex education so children can recognise and report abuse.
• Way forward: a uniform SOP for platforms, direct and quick reporting to Indian police, preserving evidence, safety by design, digital literacy in schools, child helplines (Childline 1098), and amending POCSO to adopt the term CSEAM.

Concepts to Know

• Intermediary: a company that carries or hosts other people's content, such as social media, messaging apps, search engines or internet service providers.
• Grooming: when an adult slowly builds a child's trust online, often pretending to be a friend, in order to sexually abuse or exploit the child later.
• Hash: a short digital "fingerprint" made from a file. The same image always gives the same hash, so known abuse images can be matched without people viewing them again.
• End-to-end encryption: a method where a message is locked on the sender's phone and only unlocked on the receiver's phone; even the company in between cannot read it.
• IP address: a number given to a device on the internet, which helps police trace who uploaded something.
• Special Juvenile Police Unit (SJPU): a police unit in every district set up to deal with cases involving children, under the Juvenile Justice law.
• Verifiable parental consent: permission given by a parent whose identity and age are actually checked, not just a tick-box.