What is The International Children’s Declaration and Why Do We Need It?
If you're thinking of buying digital gadgets for your children either now or in the post Christmas sales, read this first - and consider signing the declaration.
by Kate Kheel
In 1990, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which has become the world’s most widely ratified human rights treaty. The Convention touches on many rights, but for the purposes of this article, we will focus primarily on three: The right to health (both physical and mental); the right to privacy; and the right to be free from exploitation. These three fundamental rights as applied to digital technology have been largely overlooked by governments, industry, educators, the military, and the media leaving children vulnerable, and parents ill-equipped to understand and regulate their children’s use of technology.
To remedy this oversight, a team comprising an attorney, scientists, and advocates for safe technology, created The International Declaration for the Human Rights of Children in the Digital Age, authored primarily by attorney Julian Gresser.
The Declaration states:
The existence of the legal rights of children is well recognized, but not adequately or uniformly enforced, especially when those rights conflict with powerful commercial interests. In this document we set out three fundamental legal rights of children regarding the deployment and use of technology: 1) their right to be free from intentionally addictive devices, platforms, and apps; 2) their right to be free from harmful exposures to radiation; and 3) their right to be free from commercial exploitation.
In what ways are these three fundamental human rights regarding the deployment and use of digital technology in need of greater public awareness, oversight, regulation, and independent science-based media coverage?
Screentime addiction
The Convention on the Rights of the Child states, "Governments must protect children from taking, making, carrying or selling harmful drugs.” This begs the question, are online gaming, social media, and/or excessive screen time addictive? And do they adversely impact the mental health of children?
Screen Strong, a website and podcast series dedicated to reclaiming the well-being of children from tech addiction and other mental health problems from the over-use of technology, tells us that the average child spends over 52 hours a week in front of a screen.
Child advocate and author Nicholas Kardaras writes he was shocked to discover that,
"Brain imaging research shows that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic – dopamine-activating – to the brain’s pleasure center as sex."
And that,
"Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that drug addiction can."
According to Jean Twenge who has tracked the impacts of technology on the mental health of teens and young adults, anxiety and loneliness have greatly increased since 2010. She tells us, “And it's not just symptoms that rose, but also behaviors... including emergency room visits for self-harm, for suicide attempts and completed suicides.” (Read more here).
Many parents around the world are at their wits’ end trying to manage their children’s use of screens, and some are failing miserably, helplessly standing by watching their children being sucked into the black hole of purposefully designed addictive technologies.
Health impacts from wireless technology
The rapid increase in our use of wireless technology has resulted in ever higher levels of radiation in our living environments. In addition to the rise of personal and in-home wireless devices such as cellphones, WiFi routers, smart TVs, IoT appliances, cordless phones, etc., our exposure outside has also increased with ever more cell towers, satellites, and a world full of internet-connected sensors, surveillance cameras, cars, and a host of other behind the curtain “smart” technologies.
All living systems are impacted by wireless radiation (1,2,3). But children are particularly vulnerable, due to their smaller size, thinner skulls, and higher water content (1,2,). For more on effects of wireless radiation on children, click here.
The International Children’s Declaration calls on government officials to:
establish health-based NIR (non-ionizing radiation, aka wireless radiation) exposure standards and incentivize best engineering solutions that are protective of health, especially for children and pregnant women;
create safe learning environments that are free from or involve minimal exposure to NIR;
and recommends
broad public education on the unique health risks of continued exposure of children to addictive and harmful platforms and potentially dangerous levels of radiation, and the legal fiduciary obligations of administrators to discharge these responsibilities.
Exploitation of children - privacy and conflict minerals
The Convention on the Rights of the Child states:
"Children have the right to be protected from all other kinds of exploitation (being taken advantage of), even if these are not specifically mentioned in this Convention.”
And no surprise, online privacy and conflict minerals are not mentioned in the CRC.
Online privacy
Our data is valuable to industry, advertisers, government, the military, law enforcement, researchers, AI developers, et al. In fact, it is one of the main driving forces behind our increasingly digitally interconnected world. This includes children’s data, even from something seemingly as innocuous as a toy.
Services and platforms are offered “free of charge” but in fact companies take payment by monetizing our data. Most of the time, we don’t even realize our children’s data is being harvested as we (or our children) have consented to the required Privacy Agreement to access a given platform or service.
Once aggregated and sifted through, our data provides granular details about where we have been, where we’re going, what we’re doing, and what our interests and means are. According to research conducted by Super Awesome, by the time a child reaches the age of 13, ad companies will have collected about 72 million data points on that child. (NB: That article was published in 2017; we can only imagine how many data points are collected now.)
There are four main players involved in protecting children’s data: parents, industry children, and government.
Most parents, understandably, want to control what data is being collected on their children, and how that data is used. They would also like to have control over the content their children are exposed to online. But with the increasing complexity of technology, overseeing a child’s online activities is incredibly time consuming and beyond most parents’ ability.
There are parental control apps that parents can resort to, but these have serious deficiencies and loopholes, and some children find getting around these apps a fun challenge. With time on their hands, a hefty dose of motivation, and perhaps some tech savvy friends, children often manage break through layers of controls, unbeknownst to their parents.
Adherence even to the somewhat antiquated and inadequate Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is cumbersome for all parties involved – industry, parents, and educators. Both drafting and reading the detailed terms of service, as well as verifying the consenting parent is indeed the one consenting, or that a user is their stated age, is an ordeal.
Regulators are unmotivated to address online privacy given that AI is predicated on big data and is only as good as the data diet it is fed. And data serves as an integral and essential weapon system in modern warfare (1, 2). So, children’s privacy joins the ranks of screen time addiction and health impacts from wireless radiation - all in limbo, while “strategic ambiguity” is prioritized over protecting our children.
Conflict minerals
Unbeknownst to many, the production of our electronic technologies has fueled war, murder, rape, and child labor in the easternmost part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). According to World Without Genocide approximately six million people have died because of conflicts fueled by the pursuit of rare earth minerals used in our electronics.
UNICEF estimated that in 2016, there were about 40,000 children working in artisanal mines in the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and sold back to villages for ransom.
Siddharth Kara who has spent years in the DRC documenting the hardships endured by artisanal mining reports that “tens of thousands of children toil in abject squalor, endure pitiful penny wages, grave injury, and even death in order to mine cobalt.” (For more on conflict minerals see 1,2,3).
An all-things-connected world along with the current push for renewable energy and electric vehicles will likely bring more hardship, child labor, and death while ravaging the Earth.
How peculiar our world is that children in one part suffer inhumane labor practices, "Hard enough for an adult man. Unthinkable for a child”, to fuel an industry that in other parts of the world is causing the worst mental health crisis in youth ever.
Sign the International Children’s Declaration
The International Children’s Declaration seeks to end these human rights violations and to better protect children from the externalities of our digital craze. Please consider signing The Children’s Declaration on behalf of yourself or an organization you head, and share it on websites, with email contacts, and even, yes, on social media.
About the author
Kate Kheel is a musician and long time advocate for safer internet and telecommunications technology. She is a founding member of Safe Tech International, a coalition calling for more balanced and safer integration of technology into our world.
Useful links
Sign the Declaration
Declaration Text
List of expert Signatories thus far
Blog about The Children's Declaration
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