International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Child Rights Taskforce

The development of youth-centred and led online safety taskforces for more effective and youth orientated online safety policies.

Our Vision

Echoing the foundational principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), UNCRC General Comment 25 on children's rights in relation to the digital environment (2021) stipulates that children have a right to participate in the decision-making that impacts their experiences as citizens of the digital age. Further, research and practice insights consistently demonstrate that engaging children and young people in identifying online safety challenges and designing and implementing solutions leads to better products and services (Third et al, 2019) and is more likely to result in positive behaviour change (UNICEF EAPRO, 2022).

This project extends and adapts work undertaken in 2021 by the Young and Resilient Research Centre to co-design the eSafety Commissioner’s Youth Council to guide youth-centred policy making and programming. It will conduct a youth-centred and collaborative process to design a structure and implementation process to establish youth taskforces in four UN member nations (Indonesia, Lebanon, Malawi and Ecuador) that are supported by the International Telecommunications Union to develop national child online protection strategies.

The process will generate a report detailing an action plan to support implementation in each country, as well as a youth aspirational statement to guide the work of each national taskforce.

It is hoped that this project will generate a model and accompanying tools that can be replicated by other member nations who wish to establish a youth taskforce.

Our Project Plan

Y&R will deploy our distributed data generation (DDG) methodology (Third et al, 2021) to co-design the architecture and process for establishing new youth taskforces in four countries determined by the ITU to advise governments on children’s rights to protection and participation online and to drive youth-centred, impactful policy, products and programming.

Workshops will:

Y&R will train youth-facing partner organisations in each country to implement workshops, and 40 young people aged 13–18 will in each country. In total, 160 young people will take part across the four countries.

Project History

The methodology will draw on and tailor the process developed and used by Y&R in 2021 to co-design and establish the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s Youth Council, which is now in its second term. Since its establishment, Council members have played a pivotal role in helping eSafety generate meaningful guidance that reflects the concerns, needs and desires of young Australians, including providing advice to eSafety on its Age Verification Roadmap and position statement on generative AI. ESafety's Youth Council has pioneered a visionary model of youth-driven citizenship in digital environments, and we hope to be able to replicate this model for the four countries involved in this project.

What Impact will this research have?

Workshops empower young people to co-design the youth taskforce for online safety frameworks and have a say in the development of national child online protection strategies. Researchers will develop recommendations and youth aspirational statements based on collected data, specific to each country, which will provide a diverse group of young people a voice in the discourse of online safety policy creation. Young people are provided the opportunity to realise their right to participation, and help to create genuinely youth-centred online spaces that are safe, inclusive, productive and enjoyable for all.

Outputs

4 x Country Recommendations for the establishment of youth taskforces for online safety: Malawi, Lebanon, Ecuador, Indonesia.

4 x Youth Aspirational Statements for the digital world

Research Report

Journal article/s

Outcomes

New country-specific knowledge surrounding young people’s aspirations and values relating to youth participation in developing policy and practice for online safety.

New country-specific insights into perceptions of online risk amongst young people

New and consolidated partnerships with youth-facing organisations in Ecuador, Malawi, Lebanon and Indonesia.

Policy directions to support the establishment of youth taskforces for online safety in diverse global contexts.

Collaboration team

Internal collaborators

Prof. Amanda Third (lead CI)

Stephanie Hannah (co-manager)

Sarah Bacaller (co-manager)

Dr. Ümit Kennedy

Lilly Tatam

Louisa Welland

Shima Sardarabady

External collaborators/Partners

International Telecommunications Union and regional representatives

SEJIWA, Indonesia

Dar Al Amal, Lebanon

Save the Children, Malawi

[TBA], Ecuador

Funding

International Telecommunications Union

Streams

Participation and Engagement

Period

Nov 2023 – March 2025

Contact: If you would like to get in contact with the ITU Child Rights Taskforce project team, please email Stephanie Hannah at s.hannah@westernsydney.edu.au or get in contact via the below link.