NEW YORK - Protecting children from sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse requires moving beyond commitments and legal frameworks and into real protection, a UN expert said today.
"Our challenge is increasingly one of implementation," said Ai Kihara-Hunt, UN Special Rapporteur on the sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children, presenting her report to the General Assembly. "We have strong international standards, but we must ensure that protection systems are genuinely child-centred and informed by children's lived realities."
In her vision report, the Special Rapporteur identified priorities centred on strengthening protection across the full continuum of prevention, protection, response, rehabilitation, justice and reintegration.
"We need to invest more seriously in prevention by addressing the conditions that make exploitation possible, including poverty, displacement, discrimination, social exclusion, lack of education and services, unequal power relationships, weak protection systems and the absence of safe alternatives," Kihara-Hunt said.
"Child protection is a shared responsibility that requires coordinated action across governments, businesses, technology companies, schools, health professionals, communities and others," she said.
The Special Rapporteur warned that rapidly evolving technologies create new risks. "Technology increasingly enables perpetrators to identify, groom and exploit children across platforms and borders, including through emerging forms of abuse facilitated by artificial intelligence," she said. "Our capacity to detect, investigate and protect must evolve just as quickly."
The report draws attention to children who remain outside formal protection systems, including children in street situations, children deprived of parental care and children affected by migration, displacement and crises.
"We must ask ourselves how to find and protect the children who are not in our systems. This question becomes even more urgent as exploitation increasingly takes place through digital and informal spaces that traditional protection systems may not see," Kihara-Hunt said.
The Special Rapporteur further called for meaningful, safe, informed and voluntary child participation.
"Children, including children with lived experience of exploitation and abuse, should not be regarded only as beneficiaries of protection. When adherence to the principle of doing no harm is possible, we should involve children in designing, implementing and evaluating the laws, policies and programmes that affect their lives," she said.
"The sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children are complex, hidden and increasingly transnational," Kihara-Hunt said. "We need stronger cooperation, sustained political commitment and accountability. Above all, we must continue asking whether our systems are working from the perspective of the child."
