Into the Digital Future: Empowering Youth through Digital Participation with Lucha Sotomayor

In this episode, Lucha Sotomayor, a representative from the UN’s Office of the Special Representative on Violence Against Children, discusses the importance of children’s participation in addressing and preventing violence. She shares insights into various forms of violence against children, including physical, psychological, and verbal violence, as well as harmful practices like child marriage and child labor. Lucha also highlights the need to create a world where children can live free from violence and emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by parents in navigating their children’s online experiences. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the global scale of violence against children and the efforts being made to combat it.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and learn more about the series.

Lucha Sotomayor:  I’m Lucha, I work for the UN, specifically for a mandate called the Office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Violence Against Children. I specifically work on children’s participation. How children are part of the solutions when it comes to preventing, addressing and responding to all forms of violence and on violence online. We all work on different forms of violence. That’s the one that I focus on. And I’m also the author of a couple of books. One of them is called Yo Digital, which is a book for our children to be the best version of themselves online.

Jordan: And do you have children of your own?

Lucha: I do. They’re 11 and 13, just like going into the online world, just starting their own adventures, which is very challenging as a parent.

Laura:  Yes, good luck to you. 

Lucha: Thank you. 

Laura: And we feel your pain. We’re both parents, too.

Jordan: So I have to say your job sounds really fascinating. But I’m kind of suspecting that most of the people listening don’t really think about what violence against children means on a global scale, UN kinda scale, I mean, at least not beyond like when we’re all doomed scrolling through our phones right? And we hear the sensational headlines— what are the major issues that you deal with in that office right now?

Lucha: So we are an advocacy-driven mandate. We work with Member States—that’s the UN language for countries that are members of the UN which is most countries. We work with states around improving and strengthening their response to violence and to all forms of violence. So the violence against children is huge, right? People tend to think about physical violence against children. So the act of basically harming a child, which is, of course, against children, and generally, you know, there’s a whole aspect of corporal punishment that we work on in schools at home, and how not to discipline children through force right? And also you have psychological violence, you have verbal violence, you have different forms of violence that people may not think are part of their policy against children, like child marriage, and harmful practices like child labor. So basically anything that goes against the conventions of The Right of the Child. And children, according to the convention, have the right to live in a world free from violence. Anything that is a bottleneck towards meeting that right is considered violence against children. Basically depending on the region of the world, the kinds of violence that are most urgent to address, right? So, for example, child marriage is huge in Africa. It’s always something that countries in the region are working around. Violence online is something that is cross-cutting throughout all regions, and unfortunately. things like sexual violence and domestic violence, they are too. Depending on countries, the violence experienced by children on the move, refugee children, migrant, and displaced children, so a lot, and unfortunately COVID set us back a few years towards meeting our goals. We had the goal of ending all forms of violence against children by 2030, right? So I guess you’re all familiar with the SDG, Sustainable Development Goals and 16.2 is stopping all forms of violence against children. So we were to meet that goal and it’s a lot of work, unfortunately.

Jordan: Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds huge, but I’m really pleased that you mentioned the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Laura: And actually, I’m aware that recently there was also The Digital Rights of the Child, but being considered in that space as well. One of the ones that we’re really interested in is child participation and the right to participation. Can you explain a little bit more about what the convention is? And also this idea of child participation?

Lucha: Okay. So the convention is a Human Rights Treaty. It was the Human Rights Treaty that was approved the fastest in history. That means countries, adhering to it and saying, Yes, we’re going to. We’re going to take these recommendations forward, and participation is one of the core principles and guiding principles of the convention, and it means that different rights, the right to express yourself, the right to access information, the right to peacefully associate, for example, all going into the mixer, and what comes out is children’s right to participate and influence all matters affecting them, right? That is what we understand; that participation was kind of born with the Convention of the Rights of the Child which we’re going to refer to as the CRC because it’s shorter. I was kind of born with that a bit over 30 years ago, and the interesting aspect is, it has evolved a lot, right? So at the beginning, adults were the gatekeepers to participation. Children actually needed adults to open up spaces for them to speak up, and you know, say what they wanted. That has evolved so it’s not enough to speak up. You actually want to make sure that those voices are influencing decision-making, right? And also with social media and with children’s empowerment, because, you know, 30 years in, the children who have been born are educated around the CRC. I am 41. I was born, and it was not there. There was no CRC, right? And then, when I was an adolescent, probably nobody educated me on this CRC, when it was approved. So I was not empowered by my rights. Today, Children learn in school that they have the right to participate. They learn about this CRC. They learn about that right. So that empowerment, together with the fact that you know a lot of children, not all children in the world, (about a third don’t) have access to the online world and to certain channels that are in it, are enabling environments for them to take forward their rights. If you combine these two aspects, it means that adults are no longer the gatekeepers of participation anymore. And I don’t, children are taking those spaces. Let’s look at Greta. Let’s look at you know, child-led movements looking to influence change. Now adults are still the gatekeepers of programs and policies affecting children, right? So there’s still a need to bridge that gap. So what we do at the office that I work for is we work towards breaking that gap between children who are taking forward actions around violence and other issues, and they are looking to influence change and decision makers and world leaders, and those actually behind the programs and policy start affecting these children. How do we support the first group with knowledge and tools to influence change? And how do we support the adult world into channeling children’s participation towards effect and positive change for them and their communities?

Laura: Yeah, so actually, that sort of really reminded me of something. So recently, I joined a project that you are heading up, called the POP Project, and I think that this would be a really good opportunity to speak a little bit about that. Could you explain what the project is? and actually how that links with this idea of child participation as well? 

Lucha: Yes, I’d be happy to. So POP stands for Protection through Online Participation, and it’s about this whole aspect of children participating online. But we narrowed it down to participating towards being safer, right? So we always look at the online world as a place where children are at risk of different from violence, right? And they still are, and we still need to work towards making it safer, but there’s another side of the online world, and that is how, thanks to this, you know, digital access to the digital world, children are being able to be safer too. So just like they’re able to express themselves and access information, peacefully associate. They’re also able to work towards the right of being free from violence, right? The best example is during COVID, we saw how many children went into lockdown, and services were interrupted. When we say services, the services protecting children, right? So like school teachers, health professionals. So, children don’t report violence, violence is detected. There are trained professionals that are going to be working with a child engaging with a child, and they’re going to pick up on certain things that you know, maybe warnings about a child being a victim of violence. Children don’t report for a number of issues, being scared, being ashamed, not knowing that what they’re experiencing is called violence, and it’s wrong, and that’s why adults pick up on those things, and help children, and guide them towards reporting system services. With COVID, those are interrupted in over 100 countries in the world. And children were disconnected from services and domestic violence and sexual violence increased. So children were very often, you know, living with the perpetrators or violence and disconnected from the Protection services. The online world became a very critical entry point towards being safer, connecting to a helpline, right? Reaching out for help, connecting to the police. It was a channel that could help children be safe. And also children started to create their own solutions towards being safe. There’s this beautiful example about a girl in Poland. She created a website to report gender-based violence. It’s a fake cosmetics website depending on the type of product that you buy, the type of violence that you’re saying you know that you need to help around, and you could even talk to a sales assistant who was a protection officer who would guide you through. That was created by an adolescent girl to address violence and to support her peers. Children are owning the online world to access safety. Services are adapting their channels. Child Helpline International, for example, during COVID had to increase almost 20% their online staff and volunteers to address children’s requests for help online. Now POP is about better understanding how children are using the internet to be safer if we understand it well from the user’s perspective, from the service providers perspective, from a helpline’s perspective, if we understand it better, and we understand the challenges that both children and services are facing, we can make recommendations for improving. We’re implementing these services at the UN. We should be anticipating these trends and being able to provide relevant information for all countries to take these services forward.

Jordan: I love this. I love this project so much because you know, Laura and I talk about this all the time, right? How so much of the conversation around the online world and digital is about the danger or keeping it safer and at the best, sometimes it’s like, oh, there’s positive ways. You can learn spatial reasoning or critical thinking, or you know, learning games, those kinds of things. And for years we’ve been, you know, even when we do this podcast, we’re always talking about how there are so many powerful ways that young people are using online tools to connect with affinity groups to get help, to like, find the support that they need. And while researchers talk about this all the time, not, you know this is not in the mainstream conversation about the digital world at all. So like I love that you’re doing this project, that from my understanding, you’re not only identifying the examples you’re mapping them. You’re describing how they work. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna ask you to talk about it.

Lucha: So to your first point, I completely agree. And I think the challenge is, how do we understand these systems and make sure that they’re also safe spaces for children to connect with, right? How do we make sure that it’s not always an entry point? It’s not just an entry point to safety, but it’s also a safe space to access, and we still need to be working towards making the Internet safer and more ethical and child friendlier, etc. So I think they add up right. It’s not like either or, but they should be combined and then how are we doing it? So we started off by bringing partners on board from other UN agencies. This is being co-led by our office and the International Telecommunications Union, which is the agency within the UN, but basically addresses telecommunication issues brought in by UNICEF, and other UN agencies. CSO, Save the Children, anyone you know, Save the Internet, organizations that are touching on online and children’s rights. At the same time, relevant industry players such as Roblox, such as Meta, the LEGO Group, they’re all involved in this initiative, with the goal of understanding how children are using the internet to be safer, and some academic partners and children themselves. And we first started to map. We, you know, outlined this form, asking for services. We matched services, official helplines, official hotlines, adult-led, or led by governments who are looking to provide protection to children through digital means, and where there’s a conversation that was one of the criteria we need to have. We need to map these places. There’s a conversation between two human beings, one of them a child looking for support, and we received information from almost 200 countries. And we’re currently going through all that information, from how many children do you engage with? through which technologies? Which are the challenges? Which are the benefits we’re good at? We’re starting to map now, child and youth-led solutions and asking children and young people how they’re using the online world to access safety. What platforms do they mostly interact with with the goal of looking for sake, you know?  And the question is, if you are feeling scared or unsafe, where do you go online right to look for help? And that’s what we call the second phase of the mapping. Then we’re going to be mapping the third phase— we’re going to be mapping all other platforms that are not necessarily a service or a child-led. And these were ambitious, that there’s going to be a lot of AI-driven systems and games and things around mental health. And we’re combining that with qualitative information, you know, doing running in-depth interviews with helplines who are supporting children online and asking them more in that “let’s talk about the process where you were born online”. Did you have to activate this channel? Why, when how many iterations have you gone through? Which do you think are the challenges for children? 

We’re going also interview children and young people who have been behind these solutions. We are going to be looking at children’s evaluations of these services, and interviewing industry players to understand what they have learned about children using their platforms to be safe. From our conversations with many of our industry partners, we’ve learned that it has been a challenge and that children, for example, during COVID with playing online games when on social media would be looking for support systems as well. And there is a big challenge on how to reach them, right? How do social media platforms? How do online gaming platforms for children engage? How do they bridge with protection beyond report? The account, right? How do you actually connect with protecting human beings, and not necessarily AI who are able to protect children? The Protection Community has always been focused on the offline aspect, for obvious reasons, because we detect violence right? So there are additional challenges in taking that to the online world. How do we address them because their children will continue to go online. They will increasingly look for help online. So we need to, you know, understand that. So we are up to speed, so we can provide the support that they’re asking for, and then we’re incorporating the lessons from the industry, doing some late reviews. So, throwing all of these different data inputs into a mixer and then looking at the evidence. So this is what the world is telling us, right? With all these partners, we’re hoping to get them together basically in person, just online, and work with this information to make recommendations for countries, right? So we’ll know the recommendations will be Country X. Have you implemented these services? No, we have been talking seriously. A set of recommendations, how you can. Oh, yes, we have. Okay, here’s just a recommendation on how you can make sure that it’s meeting the following standards, and it’s being effective.

Jordan: Now what’s next for you? Do you have a grand vision of the future that you’re working for like, what’s the dream of like what you’re gonna do next, your next big project, not just next week.

Lucha: POP is a big project, right? So I think that I’m gonna stick with that for a while. You know, even though we’re aiming to be able to publish recommendations next year, we want to socialize them with them, with states that we need to implement them. How do we take this forward? How do we do it? It’s not enough to make these recommendations on putting them forward. How do we make sure that children are being able to access safety and protection for online means. I think you know for me that’s a long term approach. I’m working on a couple of other books, one on LGBTQ. Actually, I also feel that we need to be like you know internet 2.0, kind of. We are very stuck on the risks online and protect yourself. But how do we empower children to own that world and make it more ethical and change it, right? So one of my key messages that I always transmit to parents and children is the fact that the Internet is not this magical thing, right? We never teach children that human beings created this,  that you know, you need to know that you need electricity and power, a great function. You need cables, basic cables that go under the ocean right that you cut them, you don’t have Wi-Fi, but they’re pouring into this world where access is available when they open their eyes and they’re online.

That connects magically, right? So there’s a sense of huge power over you, right? This is powerful, and it’s more powerful than you. How do we? How do we shift that? How do we change that power balance? and empower children to have power over the online world, and not just power on their own behavior, but on changing it and making it better? I mean, we have talked about how online is an entry point to being safer and how do we need to enhance that? and promote that? But also online is an entry point, to being very unsafe, right? Unfortunately, numbers are rising and rising and rising on childhood exportation and child trafficking on, on, on, on, on scams, on, and how do we help the future generations? That is something that they can change. I think for me that if there is a future, if there is a world tomorrow after the climate crisis. If there is a future, how do we empower these generations to make it better because we didn’t do a really good job? And we need to, you know, transmit to them that they can. I have another book called “Yo Activista”, and that is the message that it sends, anyone can be an activist. Anyone can help change the world, right? You don’t need to be this superhero right? Publicly voicing, speaking up. But you can do good from your own space, from your own personality. So yeah, how do we? How do we encourage them to? And you fix what we ruined?

Laura: You’re really speaking our language, our podcast is called “Into the Digital Future”. This is very much what we want to look at, what we want to focus on, so encouraging young people to have more ownership and control over it, I think, is a really positive thing.

Jordan:  So thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to have you here. You’ve got me thinking, so I’m sure you have all of our listeners. I was thinking about a lot of things, so thank you.

Lucha: Thank you for having me.

Laura: It was a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else that you think we’ve missed that you’d like to share?

Lucha: I think that mostly for parents to remember, when we, you know, engage with our children, we talk to our children, to remember that they are growing up in a different world than the one that we grew up with. And you know, parents, we tend to replicate how we were brought up, right? So before saying things like you won’t understand this because you’re too young, or it was different in my time, let’s try and understand the world that they’re living in. How can we help them navigate this world? Not necessarily compare it to how we grow up, and how we had to do certain things because this is a different world. So I think the huge challenge is for us to step out of our historical world that doesn’t exist anymore and try to adapt to our children’s world today, and try and connect with them around that, so we can help them navigate these, you know? I wouldn’t want to be, I wouldn’t want to have social media and the other list, and I think it is so much pressure, right? Yeah, so how do we try to be, you know, be more empathetic with the challenges that they’re facing and try and help them? and not try to replicate what we were doing at their age and offer them alternatives to the online world. When you tell them, stay off your phone. It’s to offer them something in which why don’t we go to the park? Why don’t we read together? Let’s look at something like we need to offer them outside. This is very true.

Laura: It’s been fantastic. That was a really really interesting conversation, Lucha, and we know we’re looking forward to seeing where the project goes, and you know maybe we’ll have you back next year. You can come and tell us about the progress that’s been made. It’s a great project. Thank you so much for coming on.