Privacy Policy

This website is hosted, maintained, and developed by the Renard Ltd staff.

This page explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit and interact with our website, how we use it and how we keep it secure.

We take great care with any information we receive from you and are constantly looking at ways we can improve what we do so we may change the content on this page from time to time. Please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes. By using our website, you’re agreeing to be bound by our policy.

Who are we?

Renard Ltd is the developer, content creator, and curator of the Outcry Witness website. Renard Ltd office is in London, UK.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you, for example, when you contact us via the Outcry Witness website using one of the web forms to report abuse or when you make an enquiry. We need this information to be able to interact with you.

We use website analytics tools to help us:

• Understand how visitors interact with your website
• Improve the user experience on your website
• Optimise your website to improve performance
• Track the performance of our campaigns
• Generate reports about the website traffic

What type of information is collected from you?

Outcry Witness supports people who have been sexually abused through its support service. 

Our website is designed so that Outcry Witness’ staff can’t see your contact details, however, some information that could be used to identify you is encrypted and stored on our secure servers and can be accessed by Outcry Witness staff. The following information may be recorded only if you use our contact form to reach out to us:

• Encrypted phone number (if contact is by phone)
• Email address (if contact is by email)
• IP address (if contact is by webchat)
• Caller ID
• Time & date of call
• Caller gender (if given)
• Caller age (if given)
• Contact type (i.e. by phone, email, webchat)

Statistical information

We also record some statistical information on each contact we receive, to report on and improve our service. This includes non-identifiable information, such as how distressed the individual was at the time of contact. This information is never used to report on specific people and cannot be used to identify anyone. Where we provide emotional support via electronic communications and phone, and our staff members will take steps to ensure that any notes taken for statistical purposes are kept secure and securely disposed of once the data has been entered into our secure central database.

Contact concerns

If we need to investigate a call or series of calls (e.g., if you make a complaint), we can use the encrypted telephone number shown on our secure central system to identify the specific calls, however this will not reveal your telephone number to us.

If you email contact@outcrywitness.com, we do our best to mask your email address by replacing it with a caller ID and message ID before it reaches a volunteer. If you reply to the email we send you, your actual email address may be visible in the addressee line. This depends on how your computer is set up. If you would like to avoid this, you should review the whole of your email message (including any historic messages, usually shown below your current reply) and delete any mention of your email address before you press send.

If you use the telephone helpline, your telephone number will be visible when you call contact Outcry Witness.

We try to keep as little information about you as possible. Outcry Witness staff members may take notes when they talk to you to assist in the conversation. These notes are shredded at the end of the call. We don’t record your phone calls to the helpline, but staff members may from time to time listen in to calls for training, quality, support, or research purposes.

Where contact is electronic (for example by email or webchat), we keep copies of this contact for 30 days only, for the purpose of providing you with support. After this time the electronic copies are deleted and only the log of the contact is retained.

Safeguarding

When we are worried about your safety or that you are being hurt either by your own actions or by someone else, we want to help you find the best way to keep yourself safe.

We’ll do this by listening and by talking to you about what you want to do. Most of the time whatever you tell us will stay between you and Outcry Witness. However, if we feel that you are unable to make decisions for yourself, sometimes we might need to tell someone else what you’ve told us to be able to help you.

This will apply to all children (those under the age of 18). Under some circumstances, it may also apply to adults, if for example, if you are an adult at risk (you have additional health or care needs which prevent you from protecting yourself)

If you share information with us which identified a child or adult as risk who is suffering abuse or harm, after discussion with you, we may contact other relevant services.

We can only do this if we have information which identifies you.

We take your confidentiality very seriously and will only consider speaking to someone else if we are really worried about what you have told us, and we feel that you are unable to make decisions.

Please see our Safeguarding Policy for further information.

Additional support

In some circumstances, we may offer to call you back or for you to call us at an agreed time. In these cases, we will record information you’ve given us to complete the follow-up call. We may need to share this information internally, because we work as a team to provide you with the best possible support, and we want to ensure that whoever you speak to is up to date with your situation.

We may contact you to offer our support if you are referred to us by another organisation or individual. Once we have contacted you, we will destroy your contact details, unless you agree to further contact – in which case we will, with your consent, keep your contact details.

Limiting or withdrawing access to our services

From time to time we may have to use the information collected about you when you contact us to make decisions about limiting access to our services. For example:

• If you contact us a lot in a short period of time we may need to manage your access to our service to ensure that others are able to get through to us. If this happens to you, you will get a message that explains how else you can contact us to discuss your support needs.
• If we believe you are abusing our service or are abusive towards staff members, we will use our system to block your calls or messages from getting through. If you can’t get through by phone, you will hear a message that explains how to contact us to discuss our decision to block you from our system.

If we take the decision to limit your access to our systems, we will make every effort to inform you as to the reason why we have restricted your access. We may ask you to give us a contact number so that a staff member can call you to talk about your support needs.

If you wish to discuss your use of the service or appeal a decision, please send an email to contact@outcrywitness.com or write to the Caller Support Team, Outcry Witness [postal address].

If you are abusive or threaten our volunteers or staff we may report you to the police, provide them with what information we hold on you.

How is your information used?

When you interact with our staff members electronically or by phone, we may ask for your personal information. We use this information to manage your engagement with us, for example, to help support you during a crisis situation

When you request information electronically or by phone we may ask for your personal information. We use this information to send you correspondence electronically or by post, for example, to inform you about the steps to take to help you leave an abusive relationship.

Keeping your information safe

We take looking after your information very seriously. We've implemented and information management and data protection governance framework. This covers physical, technical, and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction, and loss.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to us.

Who has access to your information?

Renard Limitedd and Outcry Witness staff are the data controllers and only users (data processors) that have access to this information. Renard Group’s web developing team oversee the protection of the information stored on the databases using procedures that are described below where we cover security precautions.

When we receive information, we take steps to ensure that it is treated securely. We have a SSL certificate in place for this website. You can tell this by the presence of a small green padlock before the URL in the browser bar at the top of the screen. This means all information sent between your web browser and our web server is secure.

To ensure the functionality of our website is secure along with the information we hold on the server, we have installed specific security software. This software not only provides a firewall to all administrative areas but monitors activities of less scrupulous visitors whose aim is to gain access to areas of the site where they can install malicious code. Such visitors, once identified by where they have attempted to visit and also their activity, have their IP address blocked by our systems and this is also added to a blacklist of similar IP addresses.

We routinely monitor the security of our sites’ systems such as this. When available, we update all software to maximise security. As part of our security procedures we are in touch with the wider community of web security experts who raise awareness of any potential issues and offer valuable advice.

Our server, where all information is held, is located in the United Kingdom meaning all the data and information we store is held within the EU.

Rest assured we will not sell or rent your information to third parties. We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Your rights

We respect your rights and are happy to remove your personal information from our systems if you want us to.

If you would like us to remove your personal information from our databases please email contact@outcrywitness.com.

How you can access and update your information

The accuracy of your information is important to us, and you can always inform us of any changes to this at contact@outcrywitness.com so that we can update your information.

Security precautions are in place to protect against the loss, misuse or alteration of your information and protection of the overall website

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations. This Privacy Policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third-party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third-party site.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated – 20th March 2023.