Photo by EyeEm Mobile GmbH on iStock
February 26, 2025
Authors
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Manager, Technology and Human Rights, BSR
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Manager, Technology Sectors, BSR
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Associate Director, Technology Sectors, BSR
Key Points
- Companies and governments are increasingly invested in addressing technology’s adverse impacts on children. However, current approaches are inconsistent and fragmented.
- Child Rights Impact Assessments (CRIA) can offer several benefits.
- UNICEF engaged BSR to explore how companies are leveraging CRIAs in the digital environment, and BSR has published a paper with key findings from this research.
There is more awareness of the impact of technology on children than ever before. Despite the many benefits that digital technology provides to children (e.g., access to education, free expression, and maintaining social connections), concerns are rising around the adverse impacts on mental health, attention, and protection from harm.
In 2023, Amazon entered a US$25 million settlement with the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission over charges related to children’s privacy. In 2024, concerns about children and social media platforms regularly made headlines. State attorneys general in the US sued social media companies alleging harms to children’s safety and well-being. The US surgeon general called for warning labels on social media platforms, and several tech CEOs publicly apologized to parents whose children were harmed by social media.
In response, regulators have begun to take action to address these harms. The UK passed an Online Safety Act that requires online platforms to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate or harmful content. In Australia, efforts to protect children from harm has resulted in a social media ban for children under 16. Companies developing and deploying tech tools are being required to take stock of their impacts on children’s rights and the effectiveness of their measures to address such impacts.
While companies, governments, and civil society actors are increasingly invested in addressing the adverse impacts of technology on children, approaches remain inconsistent and fragmented. Research shows that company approaches are often focused on protection issues (e.g., illegal content and freedom from exploitation or sexual abuse) and responding to legal mandates, which may cause issues related to children’s participation in the digital environment (e.g., freedom of expression or access to culture) to be overlooked. Furthermore, current approaches to assessing impacts on children are often seen by companies as a "one-and-done" exercise, rather than an ongoing process that integrates external perspectives and evolves as new technologies and use habits arise.
Several factors complicate our ability to fully understand and mitigate the adverse impacts of technology on children, including the rapid pace of technological advancement, regulatory discrepancies across different jurisdictions, and the limited availability of data about children across diverse ages, socioeconomic statuses, gender identities, geographies, and individual circumstances. As a result of these challenges and the gaps in their current approaches, companies fail to track and mitigate evolving risks to children.
Child Rights Impact Assessments
Companies have a responsibility to identify and address adverse human rights impacts associated with their operations, products, and services.
To assess impacts to children in particular, companies can conduct Child Rights Impact Assessments. CRIAs are an effective way for companies to systematically evaluate their impacts on child rights as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other internationally accepted human rights and child rights instruments. Similar to a Human Rights Impact Assessment, the CRIA uses a methodology informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and seeks input from rightsholders to identify a company’s impacts on children’s rights, prioritize these impacts based on their severity, and determine appropriate action to address them.
In 2023, UNICEF engaged BSR to explore how companies are leveraging CRIAs and help develop a CRIA tool that companies operating in the digital environment can use to systematically identify, assess, and address their impacts on child rights. The project involved extensive research into existing resources to assess companies’ impacts on children, a review of current CRIA tools and practices, an assessment of child rights considerations in new regulations, and engagement with 130 stakeholders.
BSR has published a paper that brings together key findings from this research, as well as our observations on how companies are currently approaching child rights impact assessments in relation to the digital environment. It is a precursor to the digital environment CRIA tool that UNICEF will publish in 2025.
Benefits of Conducting CRIAs
BSR’s review of the current landscape showed that while many companies seek to understand their actual and potential impacts on children in the digital environment, few use CRIAs to do so. For companies operating in the digital environment, CRIAs can be a helpful tool for several reasons:
- CRIAs allow companies to assess their impacts against the full list of child rights. Assessing against a comprehensive list of rights ensures that key issues or new impacts are not overlooked and constitutes a defensible methodology that is grounded in international human rights instruments.
- CRIAs can enable age-appropriate design through early consideration of risks and opportunities. Proactively engaging stakeholders and identifying the potential risks/opportunities allows companies to integrate these considerations into the design of a technology product and address harms before they become more severe, which can happen quickly in the digital environment.
- CRIAs can support companies’ regulatory compliance efforts. Regulations like the EU Digital Services Act, UK Online Safety Act, Australian Online Safety Act, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive require companies to assess risks to people, including children, and implement mitigation measures. CRIAs can help companies address these requirements by aligning with UNGPs due diligence approach and integrating findings into broader human rights and regulatory risk assessments.
As the digital environment continues to shape children’s lives and regulatory expectations continue to grow, respecting, protecting, and fulfilling child rights should be a priority for all businesses that engage with digital technologies—whether they are developers, deployers, or users. UNICEF’s development of a CRIA tool specific to the digital environment is a critical step in that process.
Explore BSR’s full report for detailed insights on why CRIAs are an essential practice and what to expect from UNICEF’s forthcoming tool.
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