Launch Fourth Report VOICE-IDENTITY: Understanding Intersectionality in Online Safety

After the launch of three case study reports on children with disabilities in Bangladesh, Indigenous children in Bolivia, and children who identify as LGBTQIA+ in the Netherlands, we are proud to present the fourth and final report in the VOICE-IDENTITY series. This report focuses on intersectionality and why it is essential if we truly want to make the internet safer for all children.

Why Intersectionality?

In our previous reports, we zoomed in on three groups of children who face heightened risks of online sexual exploitation of children, while also identifying unique protective factors in their lives. But children do not live single-issue lives.

A child is never only “a child with a disability,” “Indigenous,” or “LGBTQIA+.” Their experiences are shaped by the interaction between identity, poverty, gender, geography, family context, language, discrimination, and access to technology. These factors overlap and influence one another. That is intersectionality.

When digital safety policies treat children as a homogenous group, the most marginalised realities remain invisible. Intersectionality helps us see what standard approaches often miss.

Bringing Intersectionality to Life

Intersectionality can sometimes feel abstract. So in this fourth report, we chose a different approach.

We introduce three fictionalised characters, grounded in the real experiences and findings from our earlier case studies. Through their stories, we show how intersecting identities shape children’s digital lives in practice:

• Rafi: a child with a disability in Bangladesh navigating inaccessible platforms, limited digital literacy support, and cultural stigma, while also finding connection and agency online.
• Kantuta: an Indigenous child in Bolivia balancing language, territory, cultural identity, and digital exclusion, while facing unique vulnerabilities linked to marginalisation.
• Sam: a young person in the Netherlands who identifies as LGBTQIA+, negotiating visibility, community, discrimination, and online risk in a highly connected society.

These characters are not stereotypes. They are narrative tools built from real research, real interviews, and real children’s voices. Their stories make visible how risks and protections are unevenly distributed.

What We Learned

Across contexts, one message is clear: Children do not face online risk equally.

Risk is shaped by structural inequality, social exclusion, discrimination, disability, identity, and access to resources. At the same time, protection is also shaped by these factors, through supportive families, inclusive education, accessible design, community networks, and responsive institutions.

When we listen to children at the margins, we do not just hear more stories. We hear different ones. These stories reveal: Inclusion is protection.

Inclusion means designing digital safety strategies with children who are most often excluded from policy debates. It means recognising that intersectional identities shape digital experiences. And it means moving beyond generic child protection frameworks toward approaches that reflect real, lived realities.

If the internet is not safe for children at the margins, it is not truly safe.

This fourth report calls on policymakers, educators, tech companies, and child protection actors to adopt intersectional approaches in research, advocacy, and practice. Only by recognising complexity can we design meaningful protection.

The launch of the final report of VOICE-IDENTITY is not the end of the conversation. It is a beginning. An invitation to rethink how we design online child protection and to ensure that the children most at risk are not the last to be heard.