More than four in ten children and adolescents who experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse told no one about what had happened to them. Perhaps this is where the conversation about protecting children in digital spaces should begin.
On September 3, 2026, UNICEF released a report titled Through Children’s Eyes: How Digital Technologies Facilitate the Sexual Abuse of Children, based on a study of nearly 21,000 internet-using children and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 across 21 countries.
UNICEF estimates that around 20 million children, one in five internet users in this age group, experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse within a single year. Of these, more than 15 million were exposed to unwanted sexual content, around nine million were pressured to engage in sexual conversations or share sexual images, and approximately four million had sexual images of themselves shared without their consent. Nearly 60 percent of these experiences occurred on major social media platforms.
But what strikes me, alongside the scale of the harm, is the silence surrounding it: more than four in ten of those who experienced such harm told no one, and fewer than one percent had their experience reach the police, a social worker, or a helpline.
These figures are painful not only because they reveal the scale of abuse, but also because they reveal the distance that may separate a child from a person or institution they feel safe enough to turn to.
Perhaps this is where the question of protection should begin.
Not only: How do we prevent abuse? But also: What makes a child experience harm and tell no one? And whom can they turn to when it happens?
This question comes at a time when debate in Lebanon is once again focusing on protecting children from the risks of social media, with proposals ranging from banning access below a certain age to awareness-raising and greater regulation of platforms. The danger is real and should not be underestimated. But the scale of the danger does not automatically prove that banning access is the solution. Perhaps the paradox is that we rush to regulate children’s access to platforms before we have succeeded in regulating the access that abusers, platforms, and algorithms have to children.
Where Are Children in the Conversation About Their Protection?
In most discussions about digital protection, adults sit around the table: legislators, public institutions, security agencies, professionals, civil society organizations, technology experts, and families. We identify the risks, debate the appropriate age, propose bans, monitoring, or awareness-raising, and then, often toward the end of the conversation, remember the need to “listen to children.”
But what if we started there?
What if children were not simply a group we consult after we have already defined the problem and formulated the solutions?
A child is not only someone to be protected; a child also holds knowledge about their own life and experience.
Children and adolescents know things about the digital world that we may not know because they experience it differently. So it is not enough to ask: How do we protect them from social media? We must also ask: What does digital safety mean to them? Where do they feel at risk? What prevents them from asking for help? What do these spaces offer them? And what are they afraid of losing if they are excluded?
When Protection Is Reduced to Prohibition
The concept of child protection contains a fundamental tension: how do we protect those under eighteen without reducing them to their vulnerability? They have the right to protection from violence, sexual exploitation, blackmail, bullying, and hate speech. But they also have rights to access information, expression, privacy, engagement, and communication, and to have their evolving capacities considered. From this perspective, a blanket ban seems like a simple answer to an extremely complex question.
We may block an account without removing the danger. We may take away a phone without building a safer relationship. We may establish a legal age for accessing a platform, but reaching that age does not suddenly give someone the ability to understand algorithms, protect their data, or recognize grooming and exploitation. Protection is not a button we press at sixteen.
The Digital Space Is Part of Life
We still sometimes speak about the internet as though it were separate from “real life”: a physical world on one side, a virtual world on the other, with a child moving between the two.
But this separation no longer reflects the experiences of many children and adolescents. Friendships move between school, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Bullying may begin in the classroom and continue on a screen. Learning, play, love, belonging, isolation, the search for identity, news, and politics all move across both spaces. For some children, digital spaces may also provide access to information that is difficult to ask for at home, a person who understands an experience they cannot talk about at school, a support service, or a space for self-expression.
None of this makes the internet safe. But it does mean that removing a child from a platform does not necessarily remove them from danger. Sometimes, it may also deprive them of a relationship, knowledge, or a source of support.
Which Children Are We Talking About?
When we say “children,” we may conceal very different experiences beneath a single word. A seven-year-old is not the same as a fifteen-year-old adolescent. A child who relies on technology because of a disability to communicate with others does not experience it in the same way as someone who does not depend on it. A child living in a safe home does not have the same experience as one for whom the source of fear or violence is inside the home. A child with access to a good school, activities, and safe public spaces is not in the same position as one whose phone may be one of their few windows onto the world.
This is one problem with blanket bans: the same measure does not have the same impact on everyone. Age alone, therefore, is not enough to determine what protects a child. Context, evolving capacities, disability, gender, economic circumstances, safety within the family, and access to services and public spaces all shape what safety means and where risks lie.
Equality in prohibition does not necessarily mean equity in protection.
Families: Between Responsibility and Blame
It is easy for the discussion to slide into blaming parents: they give children phones to keep them quiet, they do not monitor them enough, or they do not know what their children are doing online. But before asking why a parent or caregiver gave a child a phone, perhaps we should ask about the conditions in which care takes place: working hours, the support available to families, the availability of safe public spaces, parks, libraries, and free activities that children can access. In a country that has lived through economic collapse, widespread migration, wars, and successive crises, families’ choices cannot be separated from the conditions in which they live. Families themselves need knowledge, support, and alternatives, not more blame.
But replacing blame with surveillance is not the answer either. When we call for “parental monitoring,” what exactly do we mean? Should caregivers know children’s passwords? Read their messages? Search their phones? Where does a child’s right to privacy begin? And how should those boundaries change with age and evolving capacities?
Most importantly, what about a child for whom the source of danger exists within the family itself? If many of those who experience harm tell no one, then the question is not how adults can know everything happening on a child’s phone. The question is: How do we build a relationship in which a child can say, “Something happened to me, and I need help”? Protection requires more than better monitoring. It requires trust that makes disclosure possible.
What Is the Platform Doing to the Child?
Most discussions about digital safety focus on children’s behavior: How many hours do they spend in front of screens? What are they watching? Who are they talking to? Why is it so difficult for them to stop? But what if we reversed the question? Why was the platform designed to make it difficult to stop using it? Infinite scrolling is not accidental. Notifications are not neutral. Algorithmic recommendations are not simply technical services. Attention and data have economic value, and children are not outside this economy.
If companies with enormous resources use data, design, and algorithms to understand what attracts users and keeps them on their screens, it makes little sense to place the greatest burden on children and expect them alone to develop the capacity to resist. At this point, child protection shifts from a behavioral question to a political and economic one. It is not enough to ask what children do on platforms. We also need to ask what platforms do to them. What data do they collect? How do they use it? What content do they push toward children? How do recommendation systems operate? What responsibility do companies bear when their systems lead a child toward harmful content or toward people seeking to exploit them? And why does our political capacity to regulate children’s behavior appear greater than our capacity to regulate the companies that profit from their attention?
Beyond Awareness-Raising
Perhaps it is time to reconsider the concept of “awareness-raising.” It can imply that we adults possess the knowledge while children lack it, and that our task is therefore to explain the dangers of the internet to them. Yet adolescents may know more about certain platforms than their parents or teachers do. What is needed is not another lecture telling them that the internet is dangerous, but critical digital literacy that enables them to ask questions: Why am I being shown this content? What happens to my data? How can I recognize grooming or manipulation? What should I do if someone asks me for an image? Where can I go when I feel afraid? How can I help someone who is being harmed? And we need this knowledge too, as families, schools, social and educational practitioners, and policymakers. Instead of limiting ourselves to “raising children’s awareness,” perhaps we need to learn with them.
What Kind of Digital World Have We Created for Them?
There is a paradox that is hard to ignore. We, the adults, allowed a digital system to be built whose economy depends on data and attention. We allowed companies into children’s bedrooms, schools, and everyday relationships. We made an increasing share of education, services, and social communication dependent on technology. Then, when the harms became visible, we turned to children and asked, “Why don’t you put down your phones?” Perhaps we should ask the question in the opposite direction: What have we done to make these spaces worthy of children? What laws have we put in place? What responsibilities have we imposed on companies? What alternatives have we provided beyond the screen? And where were children and adolescents when we developed the policies supposedly designed to protect them? Listening to them does not mean presenting them with a ready-made question: Are you for or against a ban?
Meaningful engagement begins before we even formulate the question. It begins by understanding how they use these spaces, what these spaces give them, what frightens them there, why they may remain silent when they experience harm, and what makes seeking help possible. Then we build policies with them, not only about them. A ban may prevent access to an account, but it does not build safety. Surveillance may uncover a message, but it does not build trust. Awareness-raising may provide knowledge, but knowledge alone cannot confront a digital system designed to capture attention and collect data.
Protecting children is a shared responsibility: a state that regulates and holds actors accountable; companies required to design safer, more privacy-respecting products; schools that foster critical digital literacy; families that receive support rather than blame; and communities that provide safe spaces for life, play, and relationships beyond the screen. And at the heart of all of this are children and adolescents whose lives we do not speak for, but with whom we share the making of decisions that affect them.
