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2024: A Year of Urgency, Vision, and Partnership in Safeguarding Children Online
As 2024 comes to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on a year marked by both immense challenges and significant opportunities in safeguarding children in an increasingly digital world. The rapid evolution of technologies—such as Generative AI and extended reality platforms—has reshaped our digital landscape, offering immense potential but also exacerbating the risks children face online. While these technological advancements promise to change lives for the better, they also outpace our collective ability to protect children from harm, presenting critical questions about how we mobilize the necessary resources to respond.
This year, we saw a growing consensus among policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society on the need for global collaboration to create a safer, more ethical digital future. Discussions around AI ethics, governance, privacy, and child safety have expanded beyond niche circles, signaling progress. Governments have begun stepping up with regulatory frameworks aimed at mitigating harm, safeguarding privacy, and ensuring accountability. However, we know regulation alone is not enough.
The single greatest barrier to achieving a safe, inclusive, and ethical digital future for children is the chronic underfunding of the field. Online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), in particular, faces a significant—and worsening—funding gap. Despite the growing awareness of the risks children face online, investment in solutions has not kept pace with the scale or complexity of the problem. Read the rest of the blog.
This year, Safe Online awarded $US 10 million across 23 groundbreaking projects designed to tackle online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) and related digital harms. These projects, selected through the global Open Call launched in 2023, are set to reshape the online safety landscape by building a robust global evidence base, driving innovation, and breaking down barriers to new technologies. By promoting shareable, adaptable tools that enhance efficiency and accessibility, Safe Online is empowering global efforts to prevent and respond to online CSEA at every level.
In 2024, Safe Online launched a new $US 5 million global Open Call to address the most pressing challenges in the fight against online CSEA. This call emphasizes innovation and high-impact solutions, aiming to spark transformative change within the ecosystem. The selected grantees, to be announced in the coming year, will lead the charge in advancing cutting-edge approaches to protect children online.
In 2024, the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund selected a new set of projects to bridge critical gaps in understanding how generative AI (GenAI) intersects with online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The projects will enhance collaboration among key stakeholders—ranging from child safety advocates to law enforcement and tech companies—ensuring that the potential dangers of GenAI are met with informed, actionable responses paving the way for a safer digital future.
Marking a significant step forward in our efforts to generate evidence on what works and what doesn’t to tackle online CSEA, five Safe Online grantees under the ‘Evidence Generation for Sustainable Impact’ cohort have now embarked on the process to rigorously evaluate their projects testing new approaches and methodologies in this field under the supervision of the Evaluation Advisory Group. They will be joined by 3 more in early 2025. These evaluations will not only uncover new evidence but also set a blueprint on how we approach evaluations of interventions to address online harms to children.
Since 2016, Safe Online has been at the forefront of the global battle against online CSEA, channeling over US $100 million in over 120 projects across 100+ countries. These investments are not just addressing immediate challenges—but are reshaping the future of online safety, driving innovation, funding ground-breaking research and fostering collaboration to create a safe digital world for children and young people.
In 2024, the flagship initiative Disrupting Harm continued to revolutionize efforts to combat online child sexual abuse and exploitation worldwide. This ambitious project is laying a robust evidence base to protect children and young people online, driving global change.
In its first phase, Disrupting Harm revealed that in one year alone up to 20% of internet using children across 13 countries in South-East Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa experienced online CSEA and offered governments and stakeholders tailored roadmaps to create safe digital spaces for children and young people. It furthermore revealed that almost one in three children did not disclose sexual abuse to anyone. On average, only 3% of victims across 13 countries called a helpline for support. Similarly, only 3% contacted the police.
For more insights, don’t miss the Disrupting Harm Data Insight Series and Evidence-Based Actions Brief, highlighting key trends, intersections with other forms of violence and cross-country comparisons.
This year Disrupting Harm scaled up to another 12 countries across 4 regions (Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Jordan, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia and Tunisia).
With a staggering 24,000 adolescents and parents interviewed, along with 12 National Legal and Policy Analyses, 12 Law Enforcement Assessments and Testimonies from 500 survivors, justice professionals, and frontline workers, this phase is poised to deliver groundbreaking insights on online CSEA.
✨ Key findings coming in 2025 – Stay tuned for transformative results that will help build a safer digital world for the next generation! Let’s disrupt harm, together.
Safe Online’s Data for Change initiative tackles the challenges of inadequate and inconsistent data on online harms to children by fostering a global, multi-sectoral community dedicated to advancing child online safety. Launched in November 2022, the initiative made significant strides this year through ecosystem mapping, strategic partnerships, and two collaborative workshops, which played a pivotal role in advancing its agenda. These workshops brought together diverse actors from across 49 countries to address gaps and barriers in data practices while co-creating practical solutions for improving data collection, sharing, and usage across sectors. Data for Change is building a stronger, more coherent data infrastructure to support advocacy, research, and practice in protecting children online.
In 2024, Safe Online took a pivotal role in shaping the global agenda on digital safety for children and young people. With critical engagement in nearly 50 strategic opportunities and events, including a groundbreaking satellite event at the margins of the first-ever Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children, Safe Online cemented its role as a catalyst for change. These efforts not only amplified the urgency of protecting children in the digital age but also drove bold, collective action worldwide.
Dive into the highlights of an exciting year, filled with milestones, innovation, and impact.
This year, Safe Online helped to drive a significant shift towards a safer digital world for children and young people. Spotlighting the urgent need for protection of children in an increasingly online world, we leveraged high-impact events to advance the fight against online child sexual exploitation and abuse. This September in New York, at the margins of the UN General Assembly and the UN Summit of the Future, Safe Online championed online safety for children and youth together with All Tech is Human.
This year, Safe Online with support from Giga, hosted ‘Safe Connections’ a first of its kind event that united connectivity experts and child online safety champions to place safety and well-being of children at the heart of the connectivity agenda. Packed with insights from experts including Dr. Najat Malla, the UN Special Representative on Violence against Children, and ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the event explored solutions for prioritising safety and ethics in an increasingly digital world. Watch the highlight video, full recording and interviews.
One hundred days before the first-ever, Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children, Safe Online together with the Brave Movement and WeProtect Global Alliance launched a global Call to Action with survivors and allies to ensure that online violence remains central to the global conversation on preventing violence against children. The Call to Action was launched at a global event in London, UK where survivors joined bereaved parents and high-level political figures, to put pressure on political leaders, funders and tech companies to end childhood sexual abuse online.
The year concluded on a powerful note with Safe Digital Futures:
Tackling Online Harms Through Joint Global Action
The year concluded on a powerful note with Safe Digital Futures: Tackling Online Harms Through Joint Global Action, a landmark event held in November in Bogotá, Colombia. Co-hosted by Safe Online, the Brave Movement, and WeProtect Global Alliance, alongside more than 15 strategic partners, the Satellite event took place on the margins of the first-ever Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children.
With over 1,100 participants from 64+ countries, the event served as a pivotal platform, shining an unprecedented spotlight on the magnitude and complexity of digital harms facing children worldwide. The event was crucial in uniting global leaders, practitioners, and advocates around a shared vision of bold, collective action for creating a digital world where children can thrive safely.
The growing momentum was evident, with high-level representatives from over 10 countries taking the stage to highlight efforts, lessons learned and global needs to make the internet safe for children; and 20 countries submitting pledges on combating online harms to children at the Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children.
This watershed moment underscores a rising global consensus that tackling this rapidly evolving crisis demands swift, coordinated, and sustained action. The insights, dialogues, collaborations, commitments and joint call to action by survivors and allies are the building blocks of our collective mission and lay a strong foundation for the ongoing and future work needed to secure a safe digital future for children.
Spotlighting the urgent need for protection of children in an increasingly online world, Safe Online together with the Brave Movement and WeProtect Global Alliance demanded urgent action to keep children and young people safe online in a powerful Open Letter to world leaders ahead of the first-ever Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children in Colombia in November 2024. The Open Letter and the joint advocacy event led to unprecedented media coverage on the issue reaching nearly 16 million people in Colombia.
This year marks a significant milestone for Safe Online, as we proudly joined the UN PoP. Safe Online’s mission aligns closely with PoP’s to align technology with children’s needs and to ensure a world where every child can connect to the digital world with the help and resources to stay safe online. We are deeply committed to collaborating with a global community of experts to advance this shared mission, ensuring every child has the support and resources to thrive online while staying protected.
Safe Online and partners contributed to shaping the Global Digital Compact, adopted at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September 2024, which marked a historic milestone in protecting children’s rights in the digital age. The Compact commits governments to upholding international law and human rights online and to taking concrete steps to make the digital space safe and secure. Earlier this year, Safe Online, in partnership with five leading expert organizations, submitted a powerful joint submission to the Global Digital Compact Consultation. This built on Safe Online’s earlier submission, which brought together 43 child rights organizations to champion the integration of child protection from online risks and harms into the Compact. The submission provided a roadmap of critical principles and actionable commitments for key actors to ensure a digital world safe for children.
Building global evidence base and fostering impactful partnerships are critical components of Safe Online’s work to protect children in the digital world. Through our strategic investments, we not only generate essential knowledge but also catalyze collaboration among key stakeholders. This year, we deepened these efforts by convening our grantees on multiple occasions, creating invaluable opportunities for networking, knowledge sharing, and joint problem-solving. These engagements are central to advancing our mission, enabling collective action and innovation in child online safety.
Safe Online hosted two in-person grantee Regional Network Forums in South-East Asia & Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean in March and November 2024, respectively. These events, aligned with other events such as ECPAT International’s Regional Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand and the Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children in Bogota, Colombia, united a powerhouse of experts and changemakers to spark collaboration and innovation. Participants shared strategies, exchanged insights, and forged connections, identifying critical needs and opportunities to strengthen collective action in combating online CSEA. In addition to this, Safe Online attended ECPAT’s Regional Workshop in West Africa to expand our collaboration and investments in this region.
Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund Convening: The Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund grantees came together in October 2024 in London, UK to continue their collaborative efforts in advancing child online safety. Over 50 participants joined, representing all 13 grant projects from the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund as well as more than a dozen leading tech companies. Held alongside the Tech Coalitions’s Initiate Hackathon, the event featured a large engineering presence enriching discussions with diverse perspectives. Through a multidirectional dialogue, participants explored ways to transform cutting-edge research into actionable strategies, bridging the gap between insights and real-world impact in tackling digital harms to children. The event also showcased concrete partnerships between academia and tech industry fostered by the Research Fund.
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