The Right to Security of Online Childhood

Abstract

The complex relationship between children online and digital technologies is the starting point of this reflection of a growing process of multidisciplinary theoretical attention to building children’s biographies. On the one hand, the concepts of “risk and childhood safety” have become increasingly central in institutional discourses. The content of this attention seems, however, to assume more the form of adults’ fears, dealing with an endless struggle for a utopian safety for their children, than the reality of what really can be a “risk” for children online. On the other hand, the current changes in the representations of childhood are increasingly oriented to a vision of the child as the subject of its own history and therefore more active and participatory. This makes it difficult to manage the distinction between adults and children and is problematic for the use of traditional parenting styles. Starting from a reflection on the main theoretical perspectives that have been compared on the issues of social change, this paper aims to clarify and problematise some of the paradoxes that accompany what has been said relating to children’s safety in the so-called second modernity, compared to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the powerful entry of technology digital science in familial contexts.