Fwd: [DC] Advocacy Brief: Safety Standards for Teens and Children in IGF and UN Processes
Amali De Silva - Mitchell
From: Dynamic Teen Coalition <dynamictee...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 01:37
Subject: [DC] Advocacy Brief: Safety Standards for Teens and Children in IGF and UN Processes
To: dc <d...@intgovforum.org>
Cc: Nadia Tjahja <nadia....@gmail.com>, Stacy Gildenston <Stacy...@gmail.com>, Pyrate <pyrat...@gmail.com>
- No common safeguarding framework can exist across Dynamic Coalitions, Policy Networks, Working Groups, and NRIs without each agreeing to, funding, and enforcing its use.
- Responses to harm have no obvious protocols, reporting structures or designated people to even approach for help.
- Responsible and immediate safeguarding actions are left to the discretion of individuals likely with no qualifications, no unified reporting or accountability mechanisms.
- Unlike UNICEF, ITU, or UNESCO, the IGF lacks the institutional backbone to guarantee child rights protections.
Most alarmingly, these choices mean that neglect and abuse can remain hidden:
- Teens often have no trusted adult present with the skills to help.
- There is no authority to appeal to when harm occurs.
- In some cases, the very individuals in charge may decide to ignore or conceal the issue in order to protect the reputation of their IGF activity.
- No legal or ethical standards are applied when determining child and teen eligibility.
- No ongoing and specific parental permissions, media releases, and other hugely important teen and child legal frameworks are standardly required and can't be as the IGF currently exists, and while we follow a careful, parentally-involved process at DTC, we always know even we can do better.
- Any UN-affiliated employee or volunteer can arbitrarily decide what age is “appropriate,” or what is "appropriate" for any age, without justification or oversight.
- These choices ignore international frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescents, which require consistent, rights-based standards.
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Amali De Silva - Mitchell
From: Stacy B. Gildenston <stacy...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 12:26
Subject: Re: [DC] Advocacy Brief: Safety Standards for Teens and Children in IGF and UN Processes
To: Dynamic Teen Coalition <dynamictee...@gmail.com>
Cc: dc <d...@intgovforum.org>, Nadia Tjahja <nadia....@gmail.com>, Pyrate <pyrat...@gmail.com>
Updated, Distilled DTC Position based on input from DCCG's zoom today
1. Core Problem
Teens are participating in IGF/DC spaces without consistent safeguards. While DTC enforces strong protocols (parental consent, waivers, clear representation rules), those protections do not carry over into the wider IGF ecosystem. This leaves teens legally and ethically unprotected once they step into other coalitions or working groups.
2. Priorities for Action
- Proof of Age & Parental Consent Similar to or using Indico, a basic sign up process including familiarisation with an upgraded Code of Conduct should require verified age information, and when required, parental consent across the IGF.
- Safety at IGF Meetings
In-person participation must include standard permissions, emergency waivers, and other basic legal and ethical accountabilities for children and teens under 18. - Recognition of Child Rights
IGF/DC documentation should explicitly reflect the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescents, embedding nondiscrimination and protection standards. - Clearer Processes for Onboarding Newcomers
Even experienced adults find IGF onboarding confusing; for teens and first-time funded participants, this lack of guidance is a barrier to meaningful ongoing participation. - Baseline Age Structure
A lifelong, birth-to-death framework ensures teens, elders, and marginalized groups are consistently protected by flexible but universal standards.
3. Practical Gaps
- No consistent age verification or parental permission across DCs.
- No Secretariat-led reporting mechanism if unsafe contact occurs.
- The existing IGF code of conduct is now outdated — the contact email listed was not functioning the last time it was checked, and the document itself is difficult to find or navigate.
- Current codes of conduct were not designed with teen inclusion or enforcement in mind.
4. Recommended Path Forward
- Update and enforce the code of conduct, including a functioning and friendly reporting channel.
- Adopt parental consent and proof-of-age requirements across all IGF/DC spaces.
- Create a Secretariat-level reporting and accountability process for teen and child safety.
- Integrate teen (adolescent) and child rights language into IGF documentation and processes.
- Adopt the inclusive age structure as a flexible global baseline.
- Upgrade onboarding to reduce confusion and prevent exclusion of teens and newcomers.
✨DTC calls for enforceable, child-and-teen-rights-aligned safeguards — including a modernized code of conduct with a working reporting system — to ensure that child and teen participation in IGF/DC spaces is safe, consistent, and meaningful.
Warm Regards,
Stacy Gildenston
DTC Co-Chair
Dear Colleagues,
Before tomorrow’s call, we’d like to briefly expose who we are at DTC and why we are here. Humor my interruption, as this is a proper introduction, long overdue.
When Pyrate Ruby and I step into new spaces, we don’t come as outsiders and we get right to work. We bring a lifetime educational partnership building STEAM communities. Together we have launched several competitive university rocketry teams, founded Melbourne Combat Robotics, and staged a massive Hebocon robotics competition at Scienceworks. We ran the Australian Defence Force's rocketry display at the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix, and worked across all of Melbourne’s biggest makerspaces to open doors for creativity. We are partners in a media production house called Pyrate's Cove Productions.
Pyrate started in tech like so many kids now, very early. At just six, she competed in Sydney’s first Robowars during Vivid in front of 13,000 people. She's taken classes and worked at just 12 with nfts, ethereum, and WoW. By 2018, she had won the Australian Youth Rocketry Challenge. She has served for a year on the Teen Board at the National Gallery of Victoria, built mechatronics and articulated robots, welded, blacksmith’d, and even led the world’s first teen girls’ HEMA longsword class. She also loves 3D printing.
We do not (in our working partnership practice) start by telling people anything much at all about who we are. That is why, for years working here at the IGF since 2022, no one knew I had won the very first WSIS Award back in Geneva in 2003 except perhaps a few kind souls at the IGF Secretariat.
Pyrate’s story, too, is unusual. She is the first child born from a relationship that began in a virtual world. I co-founded SL2RL Love in 2008, the first blog to publish novel research documenting how Second Life connections became real-world families. Linden Labs asked us to share our story, and soon CNN, the BBC, and the Discovery Channel were featuring it worldwide.
Our work at the ITU is not random, as I had very successfully worked with the ITU for a few years as Director of Certification for Linux Professional Institute in the early 2000s. None of this international intrigue is new, and I agree nothing much ever changes at the UN. Perhaps, until now.
We also carry truths rarely spoken in these rooms. I am an intersex woman, and Pyrate Ruby is a gifted teen living with ADHD and three physical disabilities including two blood disorders and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. These are not limitations. They are the realities that have sharpened our resilience and creativity.
And so we come to you honestly. After years of effort, what we find here at the IGF are not entities, legal obligations, or organizations to work with. Instead, it feels more like a ghost town. A space inhabited infrequently, gathering dust, with only the small, warm, glowing, beautiful Swiss cabin of the IGF Secretariat keeping it from being almost entirely empty.
This is not just a feeling. Amrith pulled all the available data on the DCCG to try to map where everyone was. Jasper went through every last NRI website, most of which are now extinct. There is simply no living structure here to engage with as it wasn't designed to "exist". The IGF did incredibly well these last few decades given there is no "thing" to interact with as we work together.
This is not meant as criticism but as truth. Because we believe something better can be built. A foundation. A lifelong inclusive multistakeholder model is a foundation strong enough to anchor it. From that base, we can construct living systems for human rights, participation, and care. Something worthy of the people these processes are meant to serve.
And we should admit something we have only just recently realized. To our knowledge, no one before us has built a lifelong model like ours — a structure that begins with children, moves through the teen years, carries into early and mid career, and extends to senior leadership. It's novel. It has incredible value. We spent three years working with it, plus all of Pyrate's schooling and my previous career experiences in edu and tech, particularly within the ideals of open source.
That absence of any IGF structure explains perfectly why gaps and erasures persist. The word “youth” has stretched so far it has lost meaning. Without a baseline model that holds every age as part of the same continuum, there is no coherence to build upon. That is what makes our work not just different, but necessary.
If it is not suitable for the next iteration of whatever this is now, we have many beautiful and willing homes that will take us in. We mean you no harm, and we are tired. We have opportunities.
1) To refresh yourself on the WG Strategy Summary: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQoAw1v-Ku799gay4qZXx6a0nPzXcCxZ6-xZN2Jr2aA/edit?usp=drivesdk
2) Below is the summary of our concerns that was previously only sent to DCCG. Anyone not on that list should read it, please.
Let's be solutions focused and constructive if we address this on the DCCG call.
I'd prefer to do some efficient structural listening on this call which is why I wanted to introduce ourselves properly now, without needing in person to explain that this isn't our first rodeo.
Warmest Regards,
Stacy Gildenston on behalf of Pyrate Ruby Passell and our incredible third Co-Chair Amrith Kumar
Dynamic Teen Coalition (DTC)p.s. Sorry in advance for the diatribe. 😉
For your consideration: https://www.reuters.com/world/un-report-finds-united-nations-reports-are-not-widely-read-2025-08-01/?utm_source=reddit.com