Chapter 8 - Digital Illiteracy as a Violation of One’s Own Rights in the Age of AI: Rethinking Child Protection and Empowerment

While digital technologies promise access, inclusion, and innovation, they also pose profound risks, especially to those lacking the digital literacy. In the modern era of generative AI and opening the flood gates of digitalization to the vulnerable groups, children are the point of concern. Under the disguise of digitally upgrading the children the vulnerable group are pose open the new draconian tool called generative AI. In today’s world guardians themselves have become a violator of their own human rights via digital illiteracy and irresponsibility and over that they are shouldered with the duty of protecting the rights of their children. In many cases, parents and guardians, themselves digitally ill-equipped, unwittingly expose their children to harmful AI-driven environments. While parents hold the legal and moral responsibility to safeguard their children's rights, their own lack of awareness and digital competence infringes on their ability to fulfil that duty, thereby constituting an indirect but serious breach of both their own and their children’s rights. Drawing on legal frameworks such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), this paper will explore how digital illiteracy undermines a child’s right to protection, education, development, and participation in the digital age. This paper calls for a reimagining of digital literacy as a legally enforceable right and not just a policy objective. It brings forward a framework that integrates state support, legal reform, and ethical AI regulation, to ensure that neither children nor their guardians are left unprotected in an AI-driven world as the guardian are the main custodian of child rights. Only by doing so can digital empowerment truly be aligned with the principles of human dignity, autonomy, and rights-based child protection.