Keeping evidence and asking for help
The idea: children should be able to keep and share evidence of harm without being punished for speaking up.
Evidence is information that helps people work out what happened. It might be a message you received or a record of something you experienced.
This is a proposed right. It does not mean that every way of collecting or recording information is allowed under today’s laws.
What would this right include?
- You would not need permission from the person you are reporting. This includes family members, teachers, police, and other authorities.
- You could keep evidence somewhere that person cannot control. The service would provide a receipt and a record of who accessed it.
- Threatening you, punishing you, forcing you to delete evidence, or destroying it would be reasons for a separate investigation.
- You could ask an independent helper or review body for support, including when your report concerns the police.
- Reviewers would examine the evidence fairly. The person accused would also have a chance to respond.
A service for keeping evidence safe
An independent service could store material privately, even before you decide whether to make a complaint. It would give you a receipt showing when it received the material and offer private help with next steps.
The service must explain when it might have to share information because of an emergency or a rule requiring a report. It must not promise secrecy it cannot provide.
An example
A child receives a threatening message. Under this proposal, they could save it with the service without asking the sender’s permission. The receipt would show when it was saved. The receipt alone would not prove that everything in the message or complaint is true.
Questions still to answer
- Who would run the service independently?
- How could a child use it if someone else controls their phone or computer?
- When must information be shared, and with whom?
- How long should material be kept, and when could it be deleted?
- How would the service prevent tampering and misuse?
Keeping your own experiences or received messages is different from entering someone else’s account without permission. Keeping material privately and publishing it for everyone to see would also need separate rules.