Students participate in a Digital Citizen Day event at a school in the southern province of Tây Ninh. — VNA/VNS Photo

By Nguyễn Hằng

HÀ NỘI — Legal framework for protecting children online needs to make a decisive shift from responding to violations to preventing them, with 'safety by design' becoming a legal obligation for technology companies and online platforms.

The requirement comes as the rapid development of digital technology, artificial intelligence and online platforms is creating vast opportunities for children to learn, create and connect.

However, the opportunities are accompanied by increasingly complex risks, ranging from sexual abuse, the distribution of sensitive images, harassment and stalking to technology-enabled blackmail and grooming.

Against this backdrop, experts say child protection in the digital environment cannot rely solely on dealing with violations after harm has occurred.

Instead, it requires a comprehensive approach combining prevention, updating the system of laws and policies, further consulting the voices of children in making the laws and policies, as well as supporting parents in supervising their children’s online activities, while ensuring children can continue to learn, create and develop digital skills safely.

UNICEF Regional Child Protection Specialist Lucio Valerio Sarandrea said artificial intelligence could provide tremendous support for children’s development, but could also cause serious harm.

He cited the case of a child who had interacted with a chatbot for several months, seeking and receiving advice on how to commit suicide. The child eventually died by suicide and was even advised by the AI on how to write a suicide note.

“I think this is a powerful reminder of what we are talking about,” he said.

Sarandrea said one important shift should be to make safety by design a legal obligation rather than a voluntary commitment or action by businesses.

“The business sector must implement all the safety-by-design measures,” he said, adding that State authorities needed to introduce legislation to ensure such measures were substantive.

He also stressed the importance of consulting children during the design and development of digital products and services, saying such consultation must not be tokenistic but must genuinely take their views and experiences into account.

Time, however, remains a major challenge. Consulting children and implementing safety-by-design measures require time, while the digital environment is evolving at an unprecedented pace.

In such a rapidly changing market, businesses may fear that taking additional time to ensure safety could reduce their competitive and economic advantage.

“However, we believe we cannot put children at risk,” Sarandrea said.

“The trade-off between time and safety is clearly on the safety side.”

He said safety by design was a preventive approach, but it needed to be complemented by other measures. Responsibility should not be placed solely on parents, who also need support in supervising their children’s online activities.

“Content moderation, safety by design, and supporting parents are the three macro approaches that we are seeing and promoting through the work that we are doing,” he said.

A student attends an information session on cybersecurity safety conducted by local policed in Bình Minh Commune, in the southern province of Đồng Nai. — VNA/VNS Photo Lê Xuân

Law must stay ahead

Lê Thị Vân Anh, Deputy Director of the Department of Criminal and Administrative Law and Administrative Violation Management under the Ministry of Justice, said the Hanoi Convention, which Việt Nam became the second country in the world to ratify, emphasises the criminal handling of intentional offences involving child sexual abuse and exploitation material committed through information and communication technology systems.

These offences include producing, offering, distributing, transmitting, purchasing, possessing or accessing such material.

However, practice shows that forms of child abuse online are becoming increasingly diverse.

In addition to the distribution of images and harassment, violations can involve sexual extortion, online stalking, grooming, kidnapping and other technology-enabled crimes.

“This highlights the need for the law to be continuously reviewed and updated to keep pace with technological development,” she said.

She added that Việt Nam is conducting a comprehensive review of its legal system to identify bottlenecks and shortcomings, including regulations on protecting children online.

One notable issue is that the Criminal Code does not yet contain specific offences covering certain forms of online child abuse, such as online child sexual abuse, online sexual harassment or the distribution of sensitive images.

While such acts can be dealt with under existing provisions, this approach does not always fully reflect the nature and seriousness of offences facilitated by technology.

Hoàng Thị Sao Mai, Head of the Criminal Law Office under the Supreme People’s Court’s Department of Legal Affairs, shares this concern, saying legal gaps and difficulties in handling digital evidence remain major obstacles to protecting children and adjudicating cases involving child victims.

Mai said that, alongside strengthening prevention, Việt Nam needed to continue amending and supplementing the Criminal Code and related legislation to fully cover forms of child abuse in the digital environment.

Children voices

Đặng Hoa Nam, Vice Chairman of the Việt Nam Association for the Protection of Children’s Rights, said that children’s right to participate is enshrined in Việt Nam’s Law on Children.

Children have the right to express their views, have those views received, heard and responded to.

Their right to participate also extends to the development of laws, policies and strategies concerning children.

Various models, including Children’s Councils, Children’s Forums and local consultation programmes, have already been established.

Children have also been consulted during the development of policies concerning digital transformation, the online environment and social media.

Notably, the association conducted a survey of 2,775 children aged between nine and 16 in 16 provinces and cities.

The findings showed that children had a relatively clear understanding of online risks but wanted support from their parents, schools and peers so that they could remain safe while continuing to learn and create.

“This demonstrates that children are not merely recipients of protection but also an important source of information for developing policies that reflect their actual experiences of using technology,” Nam said.

Building ecosystem

Ngô Thị Minh Sử, a representative of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said the ministry would continue to review, update and harmonise the legal framework, while strengthening risk governance for emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and enhancing the protection of children’s data.

Another priority is to establish an inter-sectoral coordination mechanism and an ecosystem for protecting children online, bringing together the State, digital technology businesses, families, schools, society and the scientific research community.

This could mark an important shift from a model in which 'each party bears part of the responsibility' to one in which stakeholders share responsibility and work together to identify, prevent and respond to risks.

She said Việt Nam had gradually developed a multi-layered approach to protecting children in the digital environment.

The first layer is input control, through the management of infrastructure, identification, subscriptions and Internet resources.

The second is process control, focusing on the responsibilities of platforms, algorithms, content and artificial intelligence applications.

The final layer is output control, through technical standards, regulations and sanctions for violations.

Notably, new regulations require digital platforms to establish mechanisms for reporting and handling violating content.

Digital content that is unsuitable for children must carry warning labels, while AI systems operating in controlled testing environments are classified according to risk levels, including requirements related to the protection of children’s personal data.

At the same time, technical standards and regulations are gradually translating child-protection requirements from broad principles into verifiable technical criteria for products, software and online platforms.

This is regarded as an important foundation for moving away from a management model focused primarily on administrative enforcement towards the creation of technical 'filters' capable of preventing risks before they occur.

In Việt Nam, the 2022 ‘Disrupting Harm’ study by ECPAT, INTERPOL and UNICEF found that 89 per cent of children aged 12-17 were internet users, and that 2 per cent of children aged 15-17 reported having exchanged sexual images or videos for money or gifts. — VNS