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Confidentiality

dear sam,

i have a question.. if somebody says something that requires childline to tell someone, how would they do it? does childline ask for details? if they were to call the police, where would childline know where to tell them to find the child?

Ask Sam

Sam

Hi there,

You can speak to Childline about anything. Usually what you tell us is kept confidential and is private between you and Childline, but there are specific times when we may need to pass on what you tell us.

We might tell someone else when:

  • you ask us to
  • we believe your life or someone else's life is in danger
  • you're being hurt by someone in a position of trust who is able to hurt other children, like a teacher, religious leader, sports coach, police officer or doctor
  • you tell us that you're seriously hurting another person
  • you tell us about another child who's being hurt and is not able to tell someone or understand what is happening to them
  • we're told we have to by law, for example for a court case.

You can find out more about this on our confidentiality promise. When we’re worried about your safety, we’ll try to work with you to help make sure you’re okay. If we think we may need to get you some help, we’ll try to talk to you about that first.

If we need to get support to you, it might be that our counsellors will ask for your details. That might be things like your name, address, or the name of your school. If we’re not able to keep confidentiality but we don’t have any details of who someone is, then we’ll work with the police to try to locate them.

Our confidentiality promise is very important to Childline and we’ll always want to support you at your pace. If you’re ever worried that something might not be confidential, you can ask one of our counsellors about it.

Take care,

Sam

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