When It Goes Wrong

General orientation. Where a child may be at risk of harm, contact the police or a child protection service.

Everything in this collection is arranged so that a child will tell you. This note is about what happens when they do.

The first response

Thank them for telling you. Say it out loud.

Because the decision to tell was difficult, and the response to it determines whether there is a second time.

Stay calm whatever you feel, which is the hardest instruction here and the most important.

And do not take the device away as the immediate reaction, which is what they were afraid of and which confirms that telling costs something.

Finding out what happened

Open questions, slowly, without interrogation.

Accept that the account will be partial and may change as they remember more, which is normal and is not lying.

Do not ask why they were somewhere they should not have been, at least not now. That conversation can happen later and will poison this one.

And write down what you were told, with the date, which matters if anybody official becomes involved.

Preserving evidence

Do not delete anything, and ask them not to.

Screenshots of messages, profiles, usernames and timestamps.

Do not close the account until you have advice, because it can remove what investigators need.

And do not contact the other person, which can cause them to destroy evidence or escalate.

Who to involve

Where a child may be at risk of harm from an adult: the police, and the relevant child protection service in your country.

Where it is between children at the same school: the school, which has a role and a process.

Where images of a child have been shared: specialist services exist that can get them removed, and they are used to these calls.

Where the child is in distress: their doctor or a mental health service, because the online event is now a wellbeing matter.

Do not try to handle a serious matter alone on the basis that involving anybody makes it real.

What not to do

Do not punish the child for the circumstances in which it happened.

Do not make them repeat the account to several adults unnecessarily, which is distressing and can affect an investigation.

Do not confront the other party.

And do not install monitoring in response, which teaches that telling you results in surveillance and guarantees the next thing is concealed.

Afterwards

Check back, more than once, because distress surfaces later and the first conversation is not the whole of it.

Restore the ordinary arrangement rather than leaving an emergency restriction in place indefinitely, which is covered in the handover note.

And if something about the arrangement contributed, change it and say you are changing it, which makes the incident produce something.

The thing to have said in advance

"If something bad happens online, you can tell me, and you will not be in trouble, whatever you were doing at the time."

Said before it is needed, more than once, and then honoured the first time it is tested.

That sentence is the single most protective thing in this whole collection, and every note in it has been arranged to make it credible.

What to check

Has your child ever told you something difficult — and what happened?

Do they know who else you would involve, and would that put them off telling you?

Do you know where you would report each of the serious categories?

And is the sentence above something you have actually said out loud?

What this changes

Thanking a child for telling you, before anything else, is what determines whether there is a second time.

Every arrangement in this collection exists to make that first disclosure possible.

The check

Ask yourself whether you have actually said the no-penalty sentence out loud.

Most parents believe it is understood and most children are not sure.