Legislating for the Digital Age: Global guide on improving legislative frameworks to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse.
Professor Dame Carolyn Hamilton, Awaz Raoof, Catherine Burke and Ramyah Harrichandiran
May 2022
Under the Long-Term Arrangement to provide technical expertise on Child Protection to UNICEF, the Coram International has been contracted by UNICEF HQ to support the project: “Building back better child protection systems: improving legislative frameworks to protect children from online child sexual exploitation and abuse”. The scale, severity, and complexity of online child sexual exploitation and abuse is increasing at a high pace. In countries with wide access to the internet and digital technology, COVID-19 has also pushed more and more aspects of children’s lives online. At the same time many countries remain ill-equipped to prevent and respond and lack up-to-date and robust legislative and regulatory frameworks. This, in turn, affects children’s access to justice. In light of this, Coram International supported the development of a global guide on legislative responses to online or “technology-enabled” child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA). Aimed at a range of stakeholders including government, development partners, international organisations, and civil society advocating for, developing and reforming legislation the guide provides recommendations around minimum legal standards to address the various forms of online or “technology-enabled” CSEA with reference to international child rights law norms, documents lessons learned in legislative development and reform and analyses new and challenging issues at the frontiers of child protection and technology.