At a time when global reports reveal that one in three internet users is a child under 18, Jordan’s first Children’s Rights Country Report, recently issued by the National Council for Family Affairs NCFA, shows a 221% increase in reported cases of online child sexual exploitation over the past three years.
This figure invites two interpretations. On one hand, it may reflect a positive trend: rising awareness and stronger monitoring and reporting mechanisms, meaning more cases are finally being uncovered after years of remaining hidden. On the other hand, and more importantly, it is a stark warning. Crimes of this nature are among the most underreported globally. Estimates by UNICEF suggest that reported cases represent, at best, only 5 to 10% of the actual scale. In other words, what we are seeing is likely just the tip of the iceberg, while the vast majority of abuse remains hidden behind screens, silenced by fear, stigma, and the lack of safe reporting channels.
These findings come at a moment of growing policy attention. The government has established a national committee to protect children and adolescents from the risks of social media, while public calls for stricter regulation continue to intensify, sometimes extending to demands for banning social media and AI for those under 16. This raises a more fundamental question: do we need to restrict children’s access to the internet, or do we need to make the internet safer for children?
The answer, of course, is Yes! We need to restrict children's access and we need to make it safer when they do.
The uncomfortable truth is that today’s digital environment is built around the adult user and driven primarily by commercial growth. Algorithms prioritise what captures attention, not what protects well-being. Safety features are often difficult to find or disabled by default. Reporting systems are slow or ineffective. Meanwhile, data is collected at scale, even from young users.
These are not technical oversights; they are deliberate design choices. The harm children experience online is not accidental. It is predictable and, crucially, preventable. This is why the debate must shift from access to design.
Globally, this shift is beginning to take shape, not only in public discourse but also in legislation. One notable example is Brazil’s approach through what is known as the "ECA Digital framework". Rather than imposing a blanket ban, it focuses on holding technology companies accountable for the environments they create. The premise is simple but transformative: safety and privacy must be built into digital products from the outset, not added later in response to harm or public pressure.
In practice, this means requiring companies to assess the impact of their platforms on children’s rights, invest in human oversight and rapid response systems, and eliminate exploitative and addictive design features. It also means minimising data collection, prohibiting the commercial profiling of children, ensuring accessible reporting mechanisms, and providing effective remedies when harm occurs. Transparency around risks and failures is no longer optional.
What such approaches do is move the conversation from good intentions to legal accountability. Child safety can no longer be treated as a matter of corporate goodwill or a feature to be improved over time. Technology companies generate billions of dollars from user attention and data, including that of children. In this context, claims of limited resources for child safety are difficult to justify.
In the local context, quick fixes such as bans or broad restrictions may seem appealing, but they address symptoms rather than causes. Children will always find ways to go online. The more pressing question is: what kind of internet are they entering? One designed to exploit their attention, data, and vulnerability, or one intentionally built to protect them?
The issue is no longer whether children are online. It is the kind of online world we are exposing them to!
Nadine Nimri, a Jordanian Journalist, is an advocacy and communications strategist.
Hasidic sect in northern Israel churns out child brides and conceals sex abuse — report
Community-wide cover-up by Bratslavers in Yavne’el preventing authorities from gauging full scale of ‘dysfunctional’ marriages, Haaretz reports
Hundreds of families from an insular Hasidic sect in northern Israel are systematically marrying off girls as young as 12 to husbands who are not much older, as welfare services fail them and community members fear speaking out, Haaretz reported Thursday.
The report cited current and former members of the Bratslav community in Yavne’el, officials with knowledge of the matter, and the previously unpublished findings of a government panel established in 2023 to look into the closed community.
The panel that looked into the community reportedly found “cases that give rise to suspected crime,” “multiple cases of dysfunctional parenting,” and “sexual abuse, part of which goes unreported.”
“It’s straight-up rape,” said a current community member quoted by Haaretz. “Nobody asks a 14-year-old girl if she wants to get married. A year later she’s taking a baby to the playground.”
According to the government panel, the weddings are mainly between children aged 15-17, who are taught from an early age to get married young.
“The community perpetuates and is permeated by a religious and cultural outlook that says early marriages of minors are desirable and, among other things, help keep youth away from various dangers,” said the government report, without elaborating, according to Haaretz.
The newspaper cited current and former community members as saying the “dangers” that the community fears are non-procreative seminal emissions, which are prohibited in halacha, or Jewish ritual law.
Current community members agreed to speak only on the side of the road, far away from the town, and were wary of approaching cars, Haaretz said. It quoted one female community member as saying, “Whoever talks risks ruining their and their family’s lives.”
The government panel that looked into the Yavne’el community was established by the Welfare Ministry with representatives of the police and of the justice, education, and health ministries following an interview by the Kan public broadcaster with a woman who escaped abuse in the sect.
The woman, Mika Maimoni, was wed at 14 to a 19-year-old husband and got pregnant in three months. Maimoni was sent to give birth in Bnei Brak and was instructed on the way there to memorize a cover story to explain her pregnancy, she told Kan. She escaped the sect in 2015 when it was grieving the death of its spiritual leader Eliezer Shlomo Schick.
Marriages like Maimoni’s are common in the Yavne’el Bratslav community, according to Haaretz. Community members cited by the newspaper said the weddings take place at a rate of one or two a month.
In 2003, Tiberias police uncovered about 20 cases of marriages arranged by Schick of young girls, some of them aged 12, to grooms as young as 15.
And in its report, the panel established in 2023 found child marriages to be “very widespread” in the community of roughly 500 families, which accounts for over half the residents in the 5,000-odd town, according to Haaretz.
But the panel reportedly said it could not give exact figures because of conspirators’ “synchronized and systematic cover-up technique and subterfuge.”
Those were said to include holding weddings in secret, changing child spouses’ addresses, giving authorities false information, appointing loyalists as teachers and counselors, and getting doctors to register adult mothers as the patients of fertility treatments performed on young girls.
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