Safeguarding

Sagacity Outreach Ministries seeks to provide ministry spaces in which children, young people and adults are treated with dignity and protected from abuse, exploitation and avoidable harm.

This policy sets out the principles that apply to all of the ministry’s public and member activity, and where to get help when there is a concern. Leaders and volunteers are expected to know it and to follow it.

This policy applies to leaders, volunteers, speakers, facilitators, contractors and participants acting within ministry activities, whether those activities are in person, online or hybrid, including private group feeds and online gatherings.

Each activity should have boundaries appropriate to its audience, setting and level of contact. An account, invitation or ministry title is never evidence that a person is safe to work without suitable oversight.

A concern may arise from something seen or heard, a direct disclosure, a change in behaviour, unsafe conduct, online contact, coercion, neglect, exploitation or information shared by another person.

You do not need to investigate or prove abuse before reporting a genuine concern. If someone discloses something to you, listen, avoid leading questions, do not promise to keep it secret and record only what was actually said or seen.

If someone is in immediate danger, call 999. This website, its forms and its email inbox are not emergency services and are not monitored continuously.

The ministry has not yet set up a restricted route for receiving safeguarding reports. Please do not put safeguarding details in Contact & Support or in the ministry’s ordinary email inbox. They are ordinary enquiry channels, not restricted safeguarding case systems.

Report a concern directly to a service that can act on it:

• if someone is in immediate danger, call 999;
• for the police when it is not an emergency, call 101;
• for a concern about a child or young person, contact the children’s services of the local authority where they live, and for a concern about an adult at risk, that local authority’s adults’ services;
• children and young people can call Childline free on 0800 1111;
• adults worried about a child can call the NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000.

If you would like to speak to someone at the ministry, you may use Contact & Support or email hello@sagacitynetwork.net only to ask for a private conversation. Do not include any details of the concern, or the names of the people involved, in that message. You do not have to tell the ministry before seeking help elsewhere.

The immediate priority is safety. Information is shared only with people who need it to protect someone, obtain advice, meet a legal duty or make an appropriate referral.

A person who receives a disclosure must not confront the person it concerns unless the police or another statutory agency directs that course.

Protective action may include changing contact arrangements, pausing an activity, removing content or restricting access while advice is obtained. Such action is precautionary and does not by itself mean that an allegation has been found to be true.

Meeting links are limited to the people they are intended for. Recording and private one-to-one contact need clear boundaries, and organisers consider visibility, supervision and how a participant can leave or ask for help.

Event and community expectations are set out in the Event participation and Community participation policies.

The ministry does not yet have a restricted system for keeping safeguarding records, so safeguarding details must not be written into the website’s forms, group feeds, event notes or the ordinary email inbox. If you need to write down what you saw or heard, keep the note factual and dated, and share it only with the service you report the concern to.

Privacy law does not prevent proportionate sharing where it is necessary to protect a person or meet a legal obligation. The Privacy information explains how personal information is handled more generally.