Keeping children safe online

Image © Safe Online/Vincent Tremeau

This month, building on the momentum of Safer Internet Day, we’re shining a spotlight on one of our partners working tirelessly to make the digital world safer for children. While the internet has unlocked opportunities, it has also left children vulnerable to online harms, including the devastating threat of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Our partner Safe Online is working to ensure that the digital world offers spaces where all children can safely explore, learn, and thrive. “Social media and other digital technologies need to be designed with child safety in mind,” says Serena Tommasino, senior advocacy and knowledge lead at Safe Online. This is all the more important when we consider that children make up one-third of all internet users.[1]

Safe Online’s mission is even more critical today, as rapid advancements in new technologies, including Generative AI, blur the lines between ‘real’ and ‘fake’. This is fuelling a mass production of child sexual abuse images and exacerbating vulnerabilities faced by children. Since 2016, Safe Online has been investing in solutions to drive systems-level change, developing cutting-edge technology tools, funding innovative research, and working to keep online child safety at the heart of technological progress. So far, Safe Online has invested over USD 100 million across 120 projects in more than 100 countries.

“This is just a drop in the ocean compared to the vast needs of the child online safety ecosystem,”says Marija Manojlovic, executive director of Safe Online. “To truly build a safe digital future, more funding and resources are needed. Progress won’t come from reacting to harms alone; we must shift our focus upstream – prioritising prevention just as much as response. A proactive, well-resourced approach is the only way to create a safer digital world for all children.”

A crucial part of the focus on prevention is understanding the risks children face. There is limited research about online child sexual abuse or children in digital environments and it comes mostly from higher-income countries. To address this research gap, Safe Online invested USD 15 million and brought together INTERPOL, ECPAT International, and UNICEF Innocenti-Global Office of Research and Foresight to research digital harms, in a landmark global research project called Disrupting Harm.

Implemented in 25 countries across six regions, Disrupting Harm provides crucial insights into how children experience digital harms, offering comprehensive evidence on the risks they face online and what can be done to prevent them. Disrupting Harm helps countries identify gaps in their systems through in-depth surveys, research, and interviews. More than 50,000 children, caregivers, and law enforcement officials participated in this groundbreaking research.

The project uncovered challenges and provided recommendations and action plans for the 12 countries that have already completed Disrupting Harm. In Malaysia, findings and recommendations from Disrupting Harm has led to an amendment in the Sexual Offences against Children Act to include online sexual extortion and livestreaming of child sexual abuse as specific crimes. These changes allow for a stronger legal response when children experience harms online. The Malaysian Government also amended the Evidence of Child Witness Act 2007 to allow for special hearings of child witnesses. This change allows children to testify about their experiences in a child-centred way that is specifically designed with their needs in mind. The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission and the Malaysian Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development played a key role in supporting data collection and sharing expertise, leading the way for these critical legal reforms.

Safe Online also invests in innovative new technologies that keep children safe. The organisation has already invested in 29 tech innovations in over 100 countries. In India, Safe Online funds Sneh-AI, a chatbot available on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Young people can talk to the chatbot about issues like healthy relationships, consent, and safe digital behaviour and are guided to useful resources. Since it was launched in 2018, the chatbot has had over 8.5 million conversations with 136,000 users.[2]

Safe Online also funds INTERPOL’s DevOps Group, which serves as a bridge between technological innovation and law enforcement operations. The project brings together tech developers and operational officers to co-create tools that enhance capabilities to combat online child sexual exploitation.

In November 2024, Safe Online brought together senior world leaders, youth and survivors, policy-makers, and practitioners at the margins of the First Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children in Bogotá, Colombia. Together with the WeProtect Global Alliance, and the Brave Movement, Safe Online hosted “Safe Digital Futures: Tackling Online Harms Through Joint Global Action”.

The event included over 1,100 participants from more than 60 countries and shared a powerful call-to-action. 20 countries formally submitted pledges addressing online harms to children at the Global Ministerial Conference – demonstrating growing momentum toward global action. 

Oak supports Safe Online through the Prevent Child Sexual Abuse (PCSA) programme’s priority funding areas of safe digital environments, which works to support advocacy and regulation of the online space to protect children from sexual abuse and solutions & research, that supports efforts to build the evidence base for effective and scalable solutions. You can read more about the programme here. You can find out more about Safe Online’s Stories of Impact here.

References

[1] ‘Digitalization | Unicef.Ch’. Accessed 13 March 2025. https://www.unicef.ch/en/what-we-do/national/digitalization.
[2] ‘About Us – SnehAI’. Accessed 28 February 2025. https://snehai.org/about-us/#about-whatsissnehai.