Episode # 13: Teresa Huizar on Child Safety Policy & Technology
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
Technology is now moving faster than our ability to protect children from harm.
Nowhere is that gap more visible than at the intersection of generative AI, social media, and child sexual abuse material.
We don’t yet have answers to basic questions like:
Who owns your likeness?
What does consent mean in a digital world?
What responsibility should platforms bear when harm spreads at scale?
Our legal and policy frameworks were not designed for a world where innocuous images can be manipulated and distributed globally without a person’s knowledge or consent.
Today’s guest works at the center of that reality, where policy assumptions meet real-world harm.
Teresa Huizar is the CEO of the National Children’s Alliance, which represents nearly 1,000 Children’s Advocacy Centers across the country.
These multidisciplinary teams bring together law enforcement, child protection, clinicians, prosecutors, and advocates to respond to child abuse and support healing.
Teresa also hosts the excellent One in Ten podcast, where she explores the science, law, and ethics of preventing child abuse.
Our conversation dug into these gaps in policy, discussing the myriad options out there to solve them, and the reasons they have stalled so far.
We also unpacked why our assumptions about policy can limit its impact.
This is a child safety policy frontier we can no longer afford to treat as theoretical.
Sponsorship Shoutout
Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.
