Safeguarding

I offer online peer support with adults. It is not therapy, counselling, treatment or diagnosis, and it is not a crisis service. I am not a statutory safeguarding service: I cannot open a social-work investigation, take a child into care, or replace the people whose job that is.

I do not offer children’s therapy, or one-to-one sessions where the child is my client. I do support parents and families, and I write guides that may be useful to people supporting PDA young people. In a session, the adult I am sitting with is the person I am supporting. They may talk about their child. I take that seriously.

I live in Somerset, in England. The work is online, so it is not limited to people nearby.

I treat what you tell me as private. There are times I need to share it, rather than keep a dangerous secret. In plain terms, that includes:

• A serious risk of harm to you, or to someone else
• A child or young person who may be at risk of harm
• Situations where the law expects information to be shared — for example in connection with terrorism or money laundering

I am not a lawyer, and this page is not a complete list of every legal duty. If I am unsure, I need to take advice rather than sit on something that could leave someone unsafe.

If a concern like that comes up, I need to:

• Take it seriously, even if it is hard to hear
• Talk with you about it where I can do that safely
• Signpost you to help, including the free crisis lines on this site, or to emergency services if life may be at immediate risk
• Share information with the police, or with the local authority where a child lives, if I believe that is needed to keep someone safe
• Keep a brief note of what I did, so I can remember it clearly

I will not investigate like a social worker, interview a child, or try to decide a family’s whole story. My job is to notice, not to keep a dangerous secret, and to pass a concern to people whose role it is to look into it.

This page is written with England in mind, because that is where I live. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland organise safeguarding differently. If you, or a child you care for, are in another UK nation, I still need to take a concern seriously. The service I would contact may not be the same as in England.