1989 saw the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the invention of the World Wide Web. The text of the CRC was the result of decades of reflection and debate about the nature of childhood and child image: are children essentially future adults and therefore ‘becomings’ (Hanson, 2012), who need to be protected and shaped during childhood in order to become successful members of society later on, in keeping with the Paternalistic school of thought? Or are they fully-fledged rights holders and ‘beings’, on equal footing with adults, in line with the Liberationist school of thought? Or something in between? This debate took place alongside a slowly maturing human rights landscape, and the 1989 CRC therefore marks the coming together of contemporary ideas relating to the nature of childhood and a broader global understanding of fundamental human rights.

The CRC contains a full spectrum of protection, participation and provision rights, which are as important to children online as they are offline. The CRC recognises children’s special rights as ‘becomings’ in need of additional protections, as well as their equal human rights as ‘beings’. Thus, in a post-CRC world, a child image which encompasses this duality should be reflected in all decision- and policymaking which impacts children.

This paper analyses the extent to which this has been the case in the digital environment. It considers how the notion of child image is an inherent component of stakeholder approaches to children and the digital environment, mapping changing responses to the evolution of the internet and the growing role of connectivity in children’s lives. Parallels with existing child rights strategies are drawn, generating proposals for re-framing our collective approach to child rights in the digital age such that balanced, child-centric, rights-based interventions become standard for all stakeholders operating at the intersection of children and connectivity.