Zimbabwe can no longer claim to protect children fully if it focuses on physical harm while leaving digital violence under-addressed. As children spend more of their lives online, safeguarding must follow them there, too.
By Delight Guma
Zimbabwe’s child-protection system remains incomplete if it shields children from physical harm but leaves them exposed to digital violence.
That is the deeper warning that emerged from a digital well-being event held last week, where young advocates launched a national survey and a “Digital Violence Youth Tunnel” to push online harms against children higher onto the national agenda.
The event itself was important. But the bigger issue lies beyond the room in which it was held.
Zimbabwe is moving deeper into a digital future, with more children learning, socialising, sharing and forming relationships through phones and online platforms.
Yet public debate on child protection still tends to focus more comfortably on what happens in homes, schools and communities than on what happens on screens.
That gap is becoming harder to defend.
The World Health Organisation recognises that violence against children includes bullying, including cyberbullying, and notes that technology can create new threats or change the forms violence takes in children’s lives.
UNICEF, meanwhile, warns that the digital environment has made it easier for perpetrators to contact, manipulate and exploit children, particularly through technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse.
That is why last week’s message matters.
The story is no longer simply about whether children are physically safe.
The real question is whether Zimbabwe’s protection systems have kept pace with the spaces children now occupy.
Digital safety is no longer optional
Speaking at the event, Nobukhosi Phiri, co-founder of the Global Youth-Led Movement on Ending Violence Against Children and a mobiliser with the Zimbabwe national chapter, described the launch of a national survey first introduced in February 2026 to gather young people’s ideas on ending violence against children.
She said that effort helped inspire the creation of the “Digital Violence Youth Tunnel”, a platform meant to bring young people into the search for solutions.
That approach matters because it moves young people from the margins of the conversation to its centre.
Too often, children and adolescents are treated only as potential victims of digital harm.
They are warned, monitored and instructed. Yet they are rarely treated as people who understand the realities of online life well enough to help shape protection strategies.
A response designed without their voices will struggle to meet the problem as it is actually lived.
Phiri also traced the movement’s growth from discussions held in 2022 and 2023 to a formal global network of youth mobilisers. By late 2024, the movement had gained international visibility through dialogues in Geneva and the Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children in Bogotá.
Zimbabwe now has its own chapter of young mobilisers and plans to host the country’s first youth town hall on ending violence against children.
That alone suggests this is no passing conversation. It is an emerging advocacy space that policymakers should take seriously.
The online threat is broader than many adults admit
Digital violence is often reduced to cyberbullying, but the risk is wider than that.
In the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare’s prepared statement, read at the event by Phiri, the dangers listed included exploitation and grooming, harmful content, cyberbullying, mental health risks, loss of privacy and identity theft.
The statement also noted that vulnerable children, including children with disabilities and those with limited access to guidance and support, face disproportionate exposure.
That warning reflects a broader international reality.
UNICEF says governments and other actors need stronger legal and regulatory frameworks, digital literacy education, caregiver support and specialised responses to protect children from technology-facilitated violence and exploitation.
WHO’s evidence also shows that online harm does not stay online in any neat or harmless way. It can spill into mental distress, humiliation, fear, isolation and long-term trauma.
In Europe, the WHO reported in 2024 that cyberbullying among school-aged children had increased between 2018 and 2022, with both perpetration and victimisation rising for boys and girls.
Zimbabwe does not need to wait for a local crisis headline of the worst kind before accepting that digital spaces can amplify harm just as powerfully as physical ones.
A child-protection system that stops offline is not enough
One of the most striking lines from the Ministry’s statement was this: if a child is safe at home but unsafe online, then protection systems are incomplete.
That is the right argument, and it should now shape policy thinking beyond a single event.
Zimbabwe’s current policy environment already gives this issue a live national context.
The National Development Strategy 2 for 2026 to 2030 sets out a broad development agenda for the country, while UNICEF Zimbabwe identifies child protection as a continuing priority, with work focused on strengthening service delivery systems, expanding the social services workforce and shifting harmful social norms.
In a country trying to modernise its institutions while expanding digital participation, it makes little sense to speak about child protection as though the digital world were still a side issue.
The challenge, then, is not just technological.
It is institutional. Families need support to understand digital risks without responding only through fear or blanket restriction. Schools need more than occasional warnings at assembly.
They need digital literacy, reporting mechanisms and safeguarding systems that recognise online abuse as a real protection issue.
Civil society must continue bridging gaps in awareness, advocacy and victim support.
Technology companies cannot keep speaking the language of innovation while sidestepping the duty to design safer environments for children.
Government, for its part, must ensure that policy, law and enforcement catch up with the realities children face online.
Why youth advocacy changes the conversation
What made last week’s event more than another awareness programme was the fact that young people themselves drove it. That matters because adults often talk about children’s digital lives from a distance.
Young advocates bring proximity, credibility and urgency.
They understand how quickly trust can be abused online, how easily private material can spread and how normalised harmful behaviour has become in some digital spaces.
Phiri’s closing questions captured that everyday danger clearly: what happens when a child shares a picture and it falls into the wrong hands?
What happens when a child trusts a stranger who leads them into harm? What happens when a damaging message is shared? Those are not abstract fears.
They are the ordinary entry points through which digital harm enters children’s lives.
The strength of youth advocacy lies in its refusal to treat children merely as passive recipients of protection. It insists that they should also help define what safety looks like.
That is a necessary shift.
Child protection has always been strongest when it listens to the people it claims to serve.
The country now faces a choice
Zimbabwe can treat digital violence as a niche issue for workshops, awareness campaigns and periodic speeches. Or it can recognise it for what it is: a growing child-protection gap in an increasingly digital society.
The second choice is the wiser one.
It accepts that a child’s life no longer divides neatly into offline and online worlds.
The same child who sits in a classroom, sleeps in a family home or walks through a community also moves through chats, feeds, private messages, gaming spaces and online networks. Protection that covers only one side of that life is partial.
Last week’s event should therefore be read not as a closed occasion but as an open warning.
Zimbabwe has entered a moment when protecting children must mean more than guarding them from visible physical harm.
It must also mean building systems, attitudes and safeguards strong enough to confront the less visible violence that can follow them into the digital spaces they now occupy every day.
That is why digital safety is no longer optional.
It is now part of what child protection means.
