What is the status of digital children’s rights?
In this Digital Child Rights Monitor we give insight how the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) addressed digital child rights in its 2025 Concluding Observations on Norway. The priority scale reflects how strongly the CRC highlights an issue in its recommendations — the higher the score, the bigger or more pressing the problem. This scale helps visualize which digital child rights issues the CRC considers most urgent and where Norway faces its greatest challenges. If a country gets a low priority score it does not necessarily mean the country is doing good, it just means the CRC made little to no mention to it.
Summary
Priority
Violence & Exploitation Online emerges as the most urgent theme, with the highest cumulative urgency score. This indicates sustained concern around risks such as online sexual exploitation and abuse, harmful content, and unsafe digital environments for children. The emphasis suggests that protection from severe online harms remains a central priority in the Committee’s observations.
Priority
Infrastructure & Capacity, Online Safety & Protection, and Privacy & Data Protection all fall within the medium-priority range. This reflects ongoing challenges related to system readiness, regulatory safeguards, and the protection of children’s personal data in digital environments. While measures appear to be in place, the scores indicate that gaps remain that require continued attention rather than immediate crisis response.
Priority
Digital Health & Well-Being receives relatively limited priority, suggesting that issues such as screen time, gaming, and mental health impacts are less prominently raised. Digital Access & Participation receives no urgency score, indicating that access, inclusion, and participation online are not highlighted as priority concerns in the current observations. This may reflect Norway’s generally strong digital infrastructure and access levels.
Overview themes
- Digital Access & Participation
- Digital Health & Well-Being
- Infrastructure & Capacity
- Online Safety & Protection
- Privacy & Data Protection
- Violence & Exploitation Online
Norway’s digital child rights profile shows a strong emphasis on protection from online violence and exploitation, which stands out as the most pressing concern. Structural issues related to digital infrastructure, online safety frameworks, and privacy protections receive moderate attention, pointing to areas where further strengthening and oversight are still needed. In contrast, digital health and well-being issues are less prominently addressed, suggesting lower perceived urgency in this area. Notably, digital access and participation are not identified as urgent concerns, likely reflecting relatively high levels of connectivity and inclusion compared to other contexts.
Violence and exploitation
- Discriminatory violence
- Online harassment and bullying
- Online sexual exploitation / CSAM
- Trafficking & exploitation
Violence and exploitation online emerge as a significant area of concern, with online harassment and bullying receiving the highest urgency score, indicating persistent risks in children’s digital interactions. Online sexual exploitation and abuse (CSAM) is also prominently highlighted, reflecting serious concerns about children’s exposure to severe online harm. Discriminatory violence appears with a moderate level of urgency, suggesting recurring but less dominant issues related to exclusion and abuse. Trafficking and exploitation through digital platforms receive comparatively lower attention, yet their presence indicates ongoing risks that still require monitoring and preventive action.
Infrastructure and capacity
- Cybercrime and cybersecurity laws
- Digitalized systems
- Training of professionals on online offences
This theme highlights a continued focus on digitalized systems, which receive the highest urgency score, indicating ongoing challenges in system readiness and implementation. Cybercrime and cybersecurity laws are addressed with medium urgency, suggesting that legal frameworks exist but still require strengthening and effective enforcement. Training of professionals on online offences is mentioned less frequently, pointing to a need for further capacity-building to support the effective application of these systems and laws.
Digital health and wellbeing
Digital health and wellbeing is addressed with medium urgency, mainly focusing on online gaming, screen time, and access to support and rehabilitation services. Mental health impacts are acknowledged but not explored in depth. This suggests that while concerns are recognised, a more comprehensive approach to children’s digital wellbeing is still needed.
Online safety and protection
This theme receives moderate attention, with safeguarding policies in digital media most frequently addressed. Awareness-raising campaigns and complaint and reporting mechanisms are mentioned, but less consistently, suggesting uneven implementation. Overall, the focus is on policy frameworks rather than on accessible and child-friendly reporting pathways.
Privacy and data protection
Privacy-related issues receive notable attention, particularly children’s digital privacy rights and data protection, surveillance and profiling. Artificial intelligence is also mentioned, indicating emerging concern about its impact on children’s rights. However, extraterritorial justice is not addressed, highlighting a gap in cross-border accountability for digital rights violations.
Digital access and participation
Digital access and participation receive no urgency in the data, indicating that these issues are not explicitly raised in the reviewed observations. This may suggest an assumption that basic access is already sufficiently ensured, or that other digital risks are prioritised over inclusion and participation. As a result, potential inequalities related to access, digital divides, and meaningful participation of children online remain underexplored.
Concluding Observations CRC
- “Strengthen measures, both online and offline, including awareness-raising campaigns, to combat and prevent expressions of racism, hate speech and discrimination against Sami children and children belonging to minority groups, including Roma and Romani/Tater children, and against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex children, and encourage the reporting of hate crimes against children, punish perpetrators with commensurate sanctions and provide adequate compensation to victims;”
- “Develop regulations and a national safeguarding policy to protect the rights, privacy and safety of children in the digital environment and to protect them from the harmful effects of excessive screen use, harmful content, online risks and targeted or age-inappropriate harmful advertising, including in the context of artificial intelligence;”
- ” … concerned… The increased risk of children becoming victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse and the increased number of incidents of sexual extortion online and grooming and of physical violence against children on social media;”
- “Take further measures, including campaigns with the involvement of children, to enhance awareness of child sexual abuse and exploitation and respond to all its manifestations, in particular online, including by strengthening professional capacity and software tools to detect and investigate such abuse and promoting training for parents and teachers about online risks and the risks associated with sexting, and to combat the stigmatization of victims of sexual exploitation and abuse;”
- “Strengthen measures to combat violence in schools, including bullying, cyberbullying and online violence, and discrimination on the grounds of race, migration status, sexual orientation or gender identity in the school context.”
- “Ensure the identification, referral and recovery of children who are victims of trafficking, including digital trafficking, and their access to support services, including interpretation services.”
- “Strengthen measures to protect the right to privacy of children in the digital environment, and the remedies available for children whose right to privacy has been violated.”
- “… concerned… Violence against children in schools, including cyberbullying, discrimination and physical force and coercion by staff. … “
- “Expeditiously improve its data-collection system and ensure that disaggregated data collected on children’s rights cover all areas of the Convention and the Optional Protocols thereto, particularly with regard to ethnicity or Indigenous origin, and systematize data on the fulfilment of children’s rights;”
- “Design and introduce data-protection safeguards to prevent the abuse of official statistics.”
- “Systematically collect data with a view to understanding the extent of these harmful practices so that children at risk can be more easily identified and their abuse prevented.”
Norway
2025
Digital Child Rights Network
Are you interested to work with us on digital children’s rights in your country? Join us.