If you are worried about a child

Decide these in advance, not in the moment. Keep them somewhere you can reach in under a minute.

• Your local emergency number.
• Your state or territory child protection reporting line.
• Your organisation's safeguarding policy, and the name of the person you report to.
• Whether you are a mandatory reporter, and exactly what that requires of you.
• Who provides after-hours support in your area if something comes up in the evening.

Children sometimes move from what the character is carrying to what they are carrying. Handle the next few seconds carefully, because they matter more than anything else in the session.

• Stop the story. Do not continue to the next scene.
• Do not ask any questions. Not who, not what, not when, not are you sure. Questions asked by an untrained adult can contaminate an account and reduce a child's chance of being believed and helped later.
• Do not repeat a question the child has already answered. Repetition teaches a child that their first answer was wrong.
• Stay calm and unshocked in your face and voice. A child watching an adult become distressed usually stops talking to protect the adult.
• Say something plain: thank you for telling me. That was hard to say. I am glad you told me.
• Never promise secrecy. Say you might have to tell someone whose job it is to help, and that you will tell the child when you do.
• Do not confront or contact the person the child has described.

As soon as you reasonably can, and certainly the same day, record what happened. Use the child’s own words rather than tidier ones, and keep your interpretation separate from what was actually said.

• The date, the time, and where you were.
• What the child said, in quotation marks, word for word as far as you can manage.
• What you said back, including any question you did ask.
• What you observed, without interpreting it.
• Who you told, and when.

StoryBridge deliberately keeps no record of any of this. The story and the choices live in the browser tab and are gone when it closes, so your own contemporaneous note is the record.

You do not have to work out whether something meets a legal threshold. That is not your job and you are not expected to be able to do it.

• Contact your state or territory child protection line and describe what you heard.
• If a crime may have been committed against your child, contact the police.
• Speak to your GP, your child's school, or a child and family health service. Any of them can help you work out what happens next.
• Get support for yourself as well. Hearing a disclosure from your own child is its own event, and you cannot hold a child steady while nobody is holding you.

• Gathering evidence. Anything a child says through a story is not a forensic account and must not be treated as one.
• Deciding whether something happened. It cannot tell you that, and the choices a child makes are not indicators of anything.
• Interviewing a child before a trained interviewer has spoken to them, where that is planned.
• Persuading a child to disclose. If a session starts to feel like it is heading that way, stop it.
• Replacing professional help for a child who needs it.