A child may be online, but our duty to protect them remains the same.

​

Just Rights for Children’s approach to digital child safety is Prevention by Design: identifying foreseeable risks to children and building safeguards into law, platforms, institutions and technology before harm occurs. Shaped by Just Rights for Children Founder and child-rights activist Bhuwan Ribhu, the approach begins with first principles: a child’s rights, legal capacity and inherent vulnerability must remain central to how digital environments are designed, accessed and regulated.

​

Just Rights for Children (JRC) connects grassroots action with systems change. Evidence from partners and frontline cases informs our research, litigation, policy and technology work, while changes in law and policy are carried back to strengthen protection and enforcement at the last mile.

​

A major legal turning point came in 2024, with the Supreme Court of India’s judgment in Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S. Harish. The judgment helped reshape the narrative from “child pornography” to Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM), recognising such material as evidence of the sexual exploitation and abuse of a child. It strengthened accountability for its possession, use and circulation and placed clear responsibility on social media intermediaries to comply with mandatory reporting obligations and report offences to competent authorities in India. JRC has since continued to pursue the implementation of these obligations.

​

On 10 September 2026, JRC took the first-principles question of children’s access to digital platforms before the Supreme Court, arguing that minors cannot be bound by digital contracts when agreements with minors are void ab initio under Indian law. While issuing notice, the Court observed that safeguards, including “firewalls”, are necessary for children online. Another important development followed when Meta agreed to begin reporting child sexual abuse matters directly to Indian law-enforcement authorities through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, marking a significant step towards operationalising local platform accountability.

​

The Prevention by Design report brings together issues that are often addressed separately, even though a child experiences them within the same digital environment. Drawing on legal and policy developments across 40 countries, 10 regional and multilateral frameworks and 12 UN instruments, it examines age restrictions, contractual capacity, parental consent, platform design, recommender systems, commercial profiling, privacy, age assurance, reporting, remedies, regulatory powers and cross-border cooperation. It looks at the law from both ends: who should be allowed access, and once a child is there, what the service itself must be required to do.

 

JRC strategy, PICKET framework, treats digital child safety as a whole-system challenge.