The Ministry of Information and Communications, in collaboration with UNICEF, organised a conference to gather ideas on a project to protect and support children in cyberspace during the 2020-2025 period, to be submitted to the Prime Minister in June for approval.

Vietnam is currently home to more than 24 million children aged under 16. They are the first generation to grow up accessing information on the internet and are also affected strongly by technology and negative issues.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Thanh Hung said the Party and State always consider protecting and caring for children as one of the basic contents of the Human Development Strategy.

Local laws such as the 2016 Children’s Law, the 2016 Access to Information Law, the 2018 Information Security Law, and the 2018 Cyber Security Law all have contents on child protection.

However, Hung said, there are still too few mechanisms to safeguard children in cyberspace, as they may easily be subjected to cyber bullying, grooming, fraud, attacks, and even sexual abuse.

Proposing measures to protect children on the internet, Hoang Minh Tien, Deputy Head of the Ministry’s Department of Information Security, spoke of five basic factors: the legal framework; effective measures to educate children; the use of technology to support children; increasing society’s capacity for internet use; and intensifying international cooperation to resolve children-related issues.

Other participants contributed ideas to improving law enforcement as well as inter-sectoral coordination mechanisms on child protection in cyberspace.

They stressed the need to attract more Vietnamese businesses, especially those operating in technology, to develop products and services to protect and support children on the internet.