School of Arts and Humanities

Digital and sexual citizenship in an age of social media bans: Interrogating the rights of children and young people conference

An initiative of the ECU Ethical Digital Futures Group

The 'Digital and sexual citizenship in an age of social media bans: Interrogating the rights of children and young people' conference is an initiative of the ECU Ethical Digital Futures Group and will be held in Perth in July 2026.

We are currently welcoming papers exploring the impact of law, policy and public discourse on young people’s rights and lived experience, as well as papers that explore children’s agency and digital sexual citizenship more broadly.

• Please send your 200-word abstract, or 500-word panel proposal, and short bios, by 20 April, 2026 to: DigitalCitizenship@ecu.edu.au 
• Abstracts will be assessed by early May and proposers notified at that time.

Important dates and information

The conference will be held from 6-8 July, 2026.

• Monday 6 July (Welcome function 5.00-7.30)
• Tuesday 7 July (Panels and presentations)
• Wednesday 8 July (Panels and presentations)

Venue: Oaks Hotel, 305 Murray Street, Perth, 6000 WA (in-person only)

Registration: $200. Early-bird registration will open soon after abstract assessment.

Welcome function: $50

Outcomes: We will publish an edited collection of papers, publisher TBC but with promising discussions underway with Palgrave Macmillan.

About the conference

Many Western countries, including Australia, are signatories to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nonetheless, the rights of children and adolescents are increasingly impacted by laws, such as the recent social media ban; and by policies prohibiting students’ use of mobile phones in schools. Often, children’s views on laws and policies that impact their rights are either not sought at all or paid scant attention. This is in contravention of Article 12 which grants all children who are capable of forming their own views the right to express them freely in all matters that affect them, requiring that these views are “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Adults’ fears around children’s digital media use are the latest in a long line of techno-panics. Such fears are increasingly likely to result in outright removal of access, as with school phone bans, and the recent ban on social media accounts for children under 16. Meanwhile, a suite of industry codes, developed with the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) and approved by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner – with the most recent codes coming into force on 9 March – will affect services used by Australians of all ages. When fully realised these codes will impact search engines, online games, social media messaging, AI companions and chatbots, app stores and equipment manufacturers and suppliers.

The law continues to lag behind young people’s digital customs and practices. This is the case with intimate digital communication, for example, where consensual sexual images shared between consenting minors remains illegal, while consenting adults are at perfect liberty to ‘sext’ each other. While safety is paramount, concerns about under-18s’ media use need to be balanced with young people’s rights as digital and sexual citizens.

Materials that have been available to teens in the past will increasingly be restricted by age checks and other gatekeeping mechanisms, even though content that some adults deem risky has been identified by many teens as providing life-affirming connections and community, particularly for marginalised young people. Indeed, many youth-focused organisations are concerned that education and support materials provided by, with and for young people may soon be locked behind age-restriction prohibitions. Proponents of these bans assert that children are not old enough to know better: young people would beg to differ.

Designed to be an academic conference, promoting new knowledge and scholarship in this area, the conference also aims to include young people as participants. We will work with young people to provide roundtable workshops to offer feedback and perspectives at the end of each day. Adults accompanying a teen or younger child who wishes to take part will be welcomed, and young people will be allocated a fee-free place.

We look forward to welcoming you in July.