Criminal Protection of Children from Harmful Digital Content

Abstract

Protecting children's rights is of paramount importance, and foremost among these rights is the child's right to life, survival, and development, by ensuring a safe environment that supports their physical, mental, social, and emotional development. However, the information revolution and the digital environment, including digital content such as violence, pornography, hate speech, or content that encourages risky behavior, may pose a direct threat to this right. This necessitates legal regulation of the dissemination of digital content and the need to define what is considered appropriate for children's digital lives, achieving a balance between the child's right to life, growth, and survival, and their right to access information, and the need to restrict and block certain websites and content that may constitute a violation of children's rights. However, what has been an obstacle to combating this content is the difficulty of agreeing on common standards and controls among countries to determine the controls for publishing digital content. This is in addition to the technical difficulties related to controlling it or prosecuting perpetrators of this type of crime, and the spread of unregulated platforms such as encrypted communication applications. Based on the above, and in light of the digital age, we find the importance of legally establishing the criminalization of digital content that is harmful to children, both internationally and domestically, which is what this research seeks to study and shed light on.