How we keep the people here safe.

Every admin and every steward can suspend a guide. Only the safeguarding lead can lift a suspension. Every such action is dated on the guide's record.

The lead is accountable for this policy, for reviewing it once a year, and for the yearly transparency report: how many requests, replies, reports and suspensions there were, and what was not checked.

Two people meet in the Circle: an adult who has written something private, and a volunteer who answers. Both can be harmed, and the design protects both.

The person asking may be grieving, frightened, ill, or in danger. The harms are: a reply that makes it worse; a guide who uses the opening to get contact details, money, or something else; a guide who pushes belief or medical advice; and a request from someone in crisis reaching nobody at all.

The guide is a volunteer reading strangers' pain. The harms are: abuse aimed at them; a request that is really a lure; and answering thirty people in a sitting, which is its own kind of harm.

Children are not in the Circle, and that is the point. Every request is checked for signs the writer may be under 18 before it is sent; if it looks that way, it is not sent, and the writer is shown a helpline for young people. No guide ever sees it. We would rather turn away some adults than let one child through.

Policy is what people promise. These are what the database refuses, whoever asks, including us:

Guides also confirm their identity with a document and a live selfie before their first reply. Read exactly what we check and what we do not.

Under every reply there is a Report this button, with seven reasons, and it needs no account. A guide has the same button on every request. Both go to the safeguarding lead, not to a system. This is the process, and the times are promises we measure on our Health screen.

1. Within 24 hours, a person reads it. The lead or a steward opens the report and the reply or request it points to. Because replies cannot be edited, what was written is exactly what is read.
2. If a person may be in danger, that comes first. Before anything else, the reader looks at whether the person who asked is at risk right now. If they are, and we hold enough to act on, we contact the emergency services in their country with what we hold. We keep almost nothing, on purpose, so this is rare — the crisis line shown on every page is the faster route, and we say so.
3. The guide is suspended while it is looked at whenever the report is about contact details, money, anything sexual, or medical instruction. A suspended guide can answer nobody. For the other reasons the reader decides case by case, that day.
4. The reader decides, and writes down why. One of: cleared (the reply was fine, or the report was mistaken); warned (a note to the guide, standing kept); removed (suspension made permanent, and the email banned so a new account changes nothing). A guide is always told which, and what was said about them, unless telling them would put someone at risk.
5. The report is closed with the decision on it. Reports are kept as the record. The person who reported is anonymous to us, so we cannot write back — the reply they reported is simply no longer answerable by that guide.
6. If a law was broken, we report it. A guide who tried to reach a person outside EverVerse for a sexual purpose, who took money, or who targeted someone we believe to be a child is reported to the police in the relevant country, with what we hold.

A guide is never removed for a reply that was merely clumsy, and never for a belief. They are removed for what they tried to do with the opening.

• Send a verse and a few words of your own. Never a diagnosis, an instruction, a promise of an outcome, or a request to move the conversation elsewhere.
• Never ask for, or give, a way to contact each other outside EverVerse. There is no legitimate reason for it in this setting, and it is the first thing we suspend for.
• If a request frightens you for the person's safety, report it, that minute. That puts it in front of the lead the same day. Do not try to handle it yourself.
• If a request is abusive or is aimed at you, report it and leave it. You owe nobody a reply.
• Stop when you are tired. The app caps you at twelve replies a day; the real limit is lower.

We do not run criminal-record checks on guides yet. Until we do, no volunteer can become a steward, and conversations are supervised only by the people who run EverVerse. We do not read requests as they arrive; a person reads a new guide's first replies, and anything that is reported, and the daily counts. We do not verify the crisis helpline in every country ourselves; we say on each page which have been checked by a person there.

We publish these gaps because a policy that claims more than the system does is worse than none. As each gap closes, this page changes.

To report a concern about anyone on EverVerse, use the button under the reply or request, or write to safeguarding@eververse.org. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number first.