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Children's rights roundtable

Moving beyond a foggy narrative of values toward impactful action to advance children’s rights in the digital environment

Meeting Note 20 November 2025, Expert Roundtable

Background

This expert roundtable, held on 20 November 2025 on World Children’s Day, gathered leading figures from research, advocacy, regulation, and international organisations to explore how evidence can drive advocacy for the implementation of General comment No. 25 on children’s rights in the digital environment. The event also served as a forum to discuss a developing theory of change for using evidence to advance accountability and implementation globally. The discussion drew on the diverse expertise of participants, including UNICEF, CRIN, NSPCC, 5Rights, the UK Safer Internet Centre, academics from LSE and other universities, and international practitioners.

Summary of Discussion

1. What has worked effectively in using evidence to advocate for children’s rights?

Participants stressed that advocacy succeeds when evidence is robust, context-specific, and strategically deployed. Several speakers highlighted that the policy teams within major technology companies have become highly professionalised, well-resourced, and tactically assertive. Civil-society organisations and child-rights advocates therefore need to strengthen their own technical expertise and approach advocacy with equal strategic clarity.

A key theme was the importance of moving beyond a “foggy narrative of values.” Participants noted that while rights-based arguments are necessary, effective advocacy requires tactical engagement, an understanding of regulatory cycles, and clear integration of evidence into policy proposals. Examples included successful multi-stakeholder collaborations in Argentina, where UNICEF and civil-society partners used nationally grounded evidence from Kids Online to influence debates on adolescent gambling, well-being, and technology use. Media attention, expert coalitions, and alignment with policy windows were central to this success.

Participants also emphasised the value of children’s own voices, both current and retrospective. Evidence from Childline, youth consultations, and recent surveys of 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK was cited as powerful material that policymakers and regulators find difficult to dismiss. The group discussed how children’s lived experiences can reveal unexpected harms, such as the impact of Snapchat “streaks” on social pressure, coercive relationships, and exposure to grooming. Combining children’s accounts with technical evidence helps reframe abstract harms into concrete, actionable problems.

Several speakers stressed the need to meet policymakers where they are. Advocates should link evidence to concerns already foregrounded in regulatory debates, for example, addictive design, well-being, or safety, and use these as entry points to introduce broader rights-based frameworks.

Participants repeatedly underscored the central role of civil society and advocacy in advancing the implementation of General comment No. 25. Civil society organisations were described as uniquely positioned to translate children’s lived experiences and research evidence into actionable policy demands, to build cross-sector coalitions, and to hold both governments and technology companies to account. Speakers emphasised that effective advocacy requires combining child rights expertise with technical understanding of platform design, regulatory processes, and corporate strategies, enabling civil society actors to engage on equal footing with increasingly professionalised industry policy teams. Strategic advocacy, grounded in locally relevant evidence and amplified through media, legal action, and national human rights institutions, was identified as essential to shifting public debate, influencing legislative processes, and embedding children’s rights standards into regulatory and design frameworks.

2. Enablers and untapped opportunities

The discussion on enabling conditions identified several opportunities:

  • Using disclosures from ongoing legal cases against major tech companies. Participants noted that internal documents filed in court often reveal companies’ own awareness of addictive design, youth vulnerabilities, and intentional strategies to maximise engagement. These materials, though under-used, offer powerful evidence for regulators and advocates.
  • Strengthening media literacy and education. Participants agreed that opportunities lie not only in formal education but also in community programmes, non-formal learning, and national digital-skills initiatives. Media literacy should be designed to support children’s participation and creativity, not solely self-protection.
  • Engaging national human-rights institutions. Examples from Ghana showed that these bodies can serve as important allies, amplifying evidence and contextualising children’s experiences for policymakers. Despite resource constraints, they can act as credible intermediaries between communities and regulators.
  • Developing locally grounded research. Several speakers noted that emerging harms, including online gambling, pornography exposure, and technology-facilitated abuse, are evolving rapidly. Local evidence, embedded in children’s own contexts, is essential to ensure timely, relevant analysis. Without this grounding, advocacy risks focusing on outdated concerns such as screen-time, rather than urgent, high-impact issues.
  • Broadening the narrative from protection to flourishing. Participants warned against allowing the debate to be defined narrowly around preventing harm. A flourishing-focused approach emphasises children’s agency, participation, and opportunities, and avoids reinforcing restrictive or punitive policy trends such as blanket bans on social media or smartphones.

3. Implications for a Theory of Change

The discussion highlighted several insights for developing a theory of change for implementing General comment No. 25:

  • Evidence must be both credible and strategically framed. Effective advocacy depends on matching data to decisive policy moments and grounding recommendations in existing legal and regulatory structures.
  • Children’s voices and those of young adults reflecting on their childhood, should be integrated systematically across all stages of the advocacy pathway.
  • Technical expertise is essential. Civil-society organisations need capacity to evaluate platform design, understand engineering choices, and translate rights standards into design expectations and regulatory duties.
  • The narrative must remain broad. A successful theory of change avoids restricting child-rights implementation to harm mitigation and instead frames rights in the digital environment as essential to participation, learning, connection, and creativity.
  • Strategic civil society leadership is a core driver of change. Civil society organisations play a critical role in mobilising evidence, amplifying children’s voices, convening cross-sector alliances, engaging media, and sustaining political pressure. Investment in advocacy capacity, technical expertise, and coalition-building is therefore central to accelerating implementation of General comment No. 25.

Next Steps

Participants discussed the value of producing further outputs beyond the meeting note and upcoming blog post. Suggestions included developing a guidance brief on how evidence can support implementation of General comment No. 25, mapping global opportunities for advocacy, and convening follow-up regional consultations. These proposals will be reviewed in the next phase of the project.

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