Women and children are the most vulnerable in the society to abuse and

exploitation. Protection to their rights are a constant battle since despite of the
passage of different measures trying to protect their rights from abuse, the fact
remains that the figure on the women and children victimized of abuse are high
and alarming.

With the shifting of the world towards the digital age, this vulnerability of women
and children is at the menace of surging since new avenues for abuse arise.
According to UNICEF, one in three internet users globally is a child. This
proportion is likely to be even higher in the global South. Organizations working
to advance children’s rights and promote well-being need to understand how
to reduce the risk of harm children face online while maximizing their
opportunities for learning, participation and creativity. Crucially, children’s
perspectives and experiences need to be considered when drafting policies
that govern the use of young people’s digital use, as well as when designing the
technology itself. However, there is still insufficient evidence globally to enable
policy and practice to act in children’s best interest. (https://www.unicef-
irc.org/research/child-rights-in-the-digital-age/)

The safety of children in the digital world is just as important as to the safeguard of
anybody’s sensitive personal data from the abuse of data theft culprits. With this,
governments are exerting efforts to establish laws and regulations that established
Internet etiquette and encouraged to uphold every user’s rights, freedoms and
privileges that should result to responsible digital citizenry. However, despite the efforts
of the different governments from the different sides of the world, they may be able to
halt the prosper of abusers, but they were not able to eradicate the acts of abuse of
these entities, and most of their victims are children who are commonly used as
instruments in pornography.

There is no question that the initiatives were meant to promote children’s rights in this
digital age, but as to how much their initiatives protected children’s rights is still up for
discussion. These initiatives were mostly in the form of regulation which, by nature, it
should be preventive. The purpose of the measures is to protect the rights of children
and prevent abuse to their rights. However, data show that in 2017, the Internet Watch
Foundation found 78,589 individual web addresses worldwide showing images of child
abuse. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/21/child-sexual-abuse-internets-
darkest-secret/) This datum alone is quite alarming. Additionally, a record number of
reports about child sexual exploitation (CSE) images were processed by the Internet
Watch Foundation (IWF) in 2019 and showed more than 260,000 reports, including tip-
offs from the public.

Leaning on these data, we will already have an idea how far the initiatives on internet
governance resulted to the efficient regulation for the safe use of children of the
internet. We can visualize that the efforts already exerted by the governments were not
that enough to answer the increasing threat to the vulnerability of children to internet
abuses and protect their rights. Hence, we can say that to ensure the maximum safety
of children’s rights in the internet, policies and initiatives should be improved and
answer all the possible loopholes which may result to abuse of children’s rights.