The challenges facing children in the digital world are escalating. As children increasingly start using web spaces from an early age, the need to safeguard their rights within these environments has become urgent to help maintain a social and prosperous society. This proposed roundtable session aims to address the critical issue of ensuring a ‘safe digital space for children’ worldwide. The session will bring together diverse relevant stakeholders to discuss and collaborate on strategies for safeguarding children's online experiences. Among other things, the discussion will especially focus on the need to develop holistic, forward-looking, and comprehensive national child online safety strategies, which include creating new, and streamlining existing policies, regulations, and enforcement/accountability mechanisms to ensure children’s online safety. This is a key recommendation of a recently developed Policy Paper by the DCO on Safe Digital Space for Children. The roundtable session aims to seek insights and experiences, and discuss ways to catalyze collaborative actions towards building the holistic child online safety strategies.

In the era of rapid technological advancements, the concern of children’s digital rights and protection is growing. To address this, the DCO has developed a policy paper that explores ways to create a Safe Digital Space for Children. This paper is based on extensive analysis, research, and discussions with experts that participated in a series of recent DCO’s Digital Space Accelerator (DSA) global roundtables. In this policy paper, the reasons that make children especially vulnerable users of new technologies are presented, the main challenges to be addressed are outlined, and the most relevant stakeholders are identified. Subsequently, some of the key initiatives carried out by various countries worldwide are analyzed, with a special focus on the DCO Member States. The policy paper culminates in presenting several actionable policy recommendations to address the most pressing challenges and risks facing children in the online world. The paper also identifies the that various stakeholders should play at national, regional, and global levels to ensure children’s online safety. The DCO will use this session to have meaningful discissions on what needs to be done for various stakeholders to enable safe online space for children, and especially how countries can develop holistic national strategies for child online safety to ensure a concerted effort towards the cause.