IGF2012- WS 125 - Innovative application of ICTs to facilitate child protection online
Channel: Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
Date: 2012-12-27

Protection of children and young people from exploitation has been already established as a key issue that needs to be adddressed at this forum and various workshops and discussions have taken place in the last 6 IGF sessions. Current studies and work of International agencies reveal that there must be continued efforts and mobilisation of various sectors involved within the Internet development and policy making to ensure such efforts continue to refine and be effective for the safeguarding of the rights of children. The work carried out to date involves legislative reforms, industry best practices, development of technical tools and sharing best practices and lessons learnt. Various partnerships have started and initiatives focussing on awareness raising, capacity building, training of various target groups including children and young people have already taken place. The session will bring leading experts from Industry, law enforcement and civil society to explore how the following objectives can be achieved: 1) Create an interface between the users and the providers (children and IT companies/ Social media providers in this case) and highlight the new challenges and vulnerabilities that are being experienced by them and useful recommendations that they can offer, coming out of the services they are using. This would also entail looking at the discrepancies and differences in practices of how these services are offered in different regions. 2) Sharing some of the new tools developed by Industry to aid law enforcement and how they can be expanded 3)Taking stock of how things have progressed within the IGF space and how these deliberations can feed into some concrete action plans for the future. Mapping some of the efforts made in the past to the changes that we see today to identify what worked and what did not. This way we can focus our resources on enhancing the partnerships that really blossomed and led to some concrete follow up. 4) How can global community help law enforcement in tracking online crimes against children. This is an innovation that can turn the regular users of ICT applications to build intelligence and support law enforcement with the help of services provided by the IT and mobile industry.
This proposed workshop is unique in the sense that it will try to bridge the technical developments witht the law enforcement efforts but guided by child centric approaches, the combination is not often found in other workshops. Moreover this session will bring the most acknowledged experts on the field together (each of the panelists is well respected in their work domain and has years of experience and recognition behind them) to make a meaningful contribution to this issue.


http://wsms1.intgovforum.org/content/no125-innovative-application-icts-facilitate-child-protection-online