The Berkman Center is pleased to announce the release of an exploratory study carried out by the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative in collaboration with UNICEF:

Working Towards a Deeper Understanding of Digital Safety for Children and Young People in Developing Nations (PDF)
 

The study was a team effort that extended prior work at UNICEF and at the Berkman Center, such as the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report, in an important direction: it is intended as a contribution towards building a deeper understanding of children’s safety in a digital context in developing nations.

The paper's three main objectives are:

• "to raise awareness about issues related to digital safety for youth in developing nations"
• "to provide a tentative map of these issues and give insights into the current state of the respective research based on an exploratory literature review"; and
• "to outline the contours of a research framework through a series of working hypotheses that might inform subsequent research efforts on these issues by connecting efforts in developing and industrialized nations."

We hope that researchers, scholars, and activists engaged with questions of youth and technology in developing countries will benefit from this beginning and utilize it as a building block for future work.

The report was authored by Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay, and John Palfrey, with assistance from Sandra Cortesi, Lauren Dyson, and Rachel Miller-Ziegler, and in collaboration with UNICEF’s Gerrit Beger, Katherine Maher, and Merrick Schaefer. Congratulations and thanks to the many hands who helped the Berkman Center-UNICEF collaboration reach this initial milestone.

For information about the Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, including links to all of its research releases to date, please visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/digitalnatives/policy

As always, we welcome your feedback