The United Nations Children’s Fund places children at the centre of international cooperation. Drawing attention to those who often have the least power to shape how global decisions can impact themselves; questions of technology, development, protection and privacy turn into understandings and discussions around children’s rights and safeguards.
At GlobalVoices 2026, UNICEF delegates will confront two urgent questions about what protecting childhood means in a changing world. ‘Lost Childhoods: Preventing the Recruitment of Children in Armed Conflict’, examines how children become associated with armed forces and armed groups, and what the international community can do to prevent recruitment, secure their release, and support their reintegration. Furthermore, ‘Behind the Screen: Protecting Children in the Age of AI’, turns to the digital world, asking how states can protect children from emerging forms of exploitation and other harmful interactions with AI whilst preserving and promoting the opportunities that new technologies can provide.
The Past
The modern international framework of children’s rights is rooted in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. In situations of armed conflict, the Convention establishes protections for children affected by war and restrictions on their recruitment and participation in hostilities. These protections were later strengthened by the Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict, while the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court made the conscription or use of children under 15 in hostilities a war crime. Over time, the international response also moved beyond viewing recruited children simply as young combats. The 2007 Paris Principles recognised that children associated with armed forces or armed groups may be used as fighters, but also as cooks, porters, spies, messengers, domestic workers, or for sexual purposes. Crucially, they emphasised that these children should primarily be treated as victims and that international responses should focus on their protection.
As childhood increasingly moved online, the same basic framework of children’s rights had to respond to a very different environment. The International Telecommunication Union launched its Child Online Protection initiative in 2008, while governments and organisations developed cross-border efforts to combat online child sexual abuse material. In 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comment No.25, calling on states to protect children’s rights in the digital environment and strengthen digital literacy. UNICEF itself has increasingly focused on the implications of AI, developing guidance intended to translate children’s established rights into principles for child-centred artificial intelligence. The 2024 Global Digital Compact further committed states to strengthening frameworks for protecting children online.
Across both issues the history of international child protection has involved adapting to establish the rights to change forms of vulnerability. The challenge has increasingly become ensuring that international commitments can keep pace with the environments in which children are at risk.
The Present
Today, child recruitment remains one the most serious violations affecting children in armed conflict. Recruitment does not occur through force alone. Children may be abducted or threatened, but they may also join armed groups in search of food, security or other factors related to survival and belonging. In circumstances shaped by hunger, displacement, family separation, and the collapse of education, the distinction between forced and voluntary recruitment can become difficult to sustain. At the same time, a different set of vulnerabilities is emerging online. AI can bring real benefits to children, from personalised educational support to accessibility tools for children with disabilities. UNICEF itself has used AI to support accessible digital textbooks through narration, image captioning and text simplification. Yet the same technologies create new risks, such as AI-generated sexual abuse material and deepfakes and other threats to children’s privacy.
Neither challenge affects children equally. Girls recruited by armed groups may be less visible when they are subjected to forced marriage, domestic work, or sexual exploitation rather than combat roles, and may subsequently face particular barriers in reintegration. In the digital sphere, unequal internet access, differences in regulatory power and the dominance in English AI training data risk leaving children in lower-income and non-English speaking communities with fewer benefits and weaker protections.
The Future
These topics push UNICEF delegates to think beyond responding to harm after it has already occurred. Preventing child recruitment possible in the first place. Protecting schools, maintaining humanitarian access, supporting displaced families, strengthening birth registration and child-protection systems, and addressing poverty can all reduce children’s vulnerability before an armed actor reaches them. At the same time, monitoring and accountability remain important for identifying violations and placing pressure on those responsible.
Protecting children from AI presents a different but equally complicated set of choices. Elegates may consider safety assessments before AI systems are released, stronger protections for children’s personal data, regulation of Ai companions, restrictions on Ai-generated sexual abuse material, age-assurance systems, digital literacy programmes, and mechanisms for detecting and removing harmful content. Yet each carries tradeoffs. Age verification can threaten privacy, stronger regulation can impose significant costs and technical protections may be difficult to implement in certain states that have insufficient regulatory capacity.
Both of these debates ultimately raise the same issue of: what does meaningful prevention look like? Whether a child is vulnerable to recruitment because conflict has destroyed their school and displaced their family, or vulnerable online because technology has developed faster than the systems designed to protect them. Effective child protection therefore requires governments and international organisations to understand where vulnerability begins and intervene before exploitation becomes inevitable.
At its heart, UNICEF asks delegates to think about what childhood should be protected from, but also how these priorities evolve and develop in our rapidly changing world. At GlobalVoices 2026, delegates will have the chance to turn those principles into practical international cooperation.