Child Rights and Digital Safeguarding

This unit examines how the rights and protections of children (as reflected in Articles 3–40) intersect with digital technology and AI. Students learn to identify legal and ethical obligations, assess risks from online harms, and design technical and policy controls that uphold children’s best interests, safety, privacy, and access to education.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze the implications of key child-rights provisions (e.g., best interests, privacy, freedom of expression, protection from abuse and trafficking, education and health) for the design and operation of digital platforms and AI systems, using concrete examples of potential harms.
• Evaluate platform policies, AI behaviors, and educational technologies for compliance with child-protection, privacy, and equity principles, and recommend improvements grounded in legal and ethical reasoning.
• Apply privacy-preserving techniques, content-moderation strategies, and accessibility/inclusive-design practices to create technical safeguards that reduce risks of exploitation, abuse, or exclusion of children online.
• Demonstrate the ability to construct an interdisciplinary incident-response and reporting plan that assigns stakeholder roles, describes legal reporting requirements, and integrates remediation, prevention, and rehabilitative measures for children affected by digital harms.