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💬 Community Q&A - Safeguarding at The Mix
JustV
Community Manager Posts: 5,319 Part of The Furniture
We've got a Community Q&A about something we're often asked about - Safeguarding
Topic
How we safeguard you at The Mix. You can ask questions about all of our services - these discussion boards, group chat, and 1-2-1 services like the helpline and counselling.
Where?
Post your questions below!
If you'd like to ask your question anonymously, click here and a staff member will post your question on your behalf. Keep an eye on this thread to see the answer.
When?
Ask your questions now and they will be answered within a few days. Unlike other Q&A's, this will be ongoing and we'll keep answering your questions for as long as you ask them.
Who are the experts?
@Liidia and @Joe, The Mix's resident safeguarding guru's!
📝 Note: this isn't a support thread
If you'd like to get some support with anything you're thinking or feeling, head over to Get Support and start your own discussion where everyone can support you.
More info below ⤵
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What is safeguarding?
Safeguarding describes how we keep all of you safe while you use our services.
That means keeping you safe as an individual and making sure our services are safe overall.
'Safe' can mean keeping you safe from trolls or other unfriendly characters, keeping you safe if you or another member is at risk of harm, deleting triggering content, and much more.
Who are the experts?
We won't discuss real situations involving real people for privacy reasons, and we can't comment on other support services. You can ask questions on pretty much everything else.
If we don't know the answer to your question, we'll be honest and say that. We might be able to go away and research your question or point you in the direction of someone else who knows the answer.
Topic
How we safeguard you at The Mix. You can ask questions about all of our services - these discussion boards, group chat, and 1-2-1 services like the helpline and counselling.
Where?
Post your questions below!
If you'd like to ask your question anonymously, click here and a staff member will post your question on your behalf. Keep an eye on this thread to see the answer.
When?
Ask your questions now and they will be answered within a few days. Unlike other Q&A's, this will be ongoing and we'll keep answering your questions for as long as you ask them.
Who are the experts?
@Liidia and @Joe, The Mix's resident safeguarding guru's!
📝 Note: this isn't a support thread
If you'd like to get some support with anything you're thinking or feeling, head over to Get Support and start your own discussion where everyone can support you.
More info below ⤵
---
What is safeguarding?
Safeguarding describes how we keep all of you safe while you use our services.
That means keeping you safe as an individual and making sure our services are safe overall.
'Safe' can mean keeping you safe from trolls or other unfriendly characters, keeping you safe if you or another member is at risk of harm, deleting triggering content, and much more.
Who are the experts?
Liidia wrote:
Hi I'm Lidia (she/her) I'm a part of the Safeguarding Steering Group and the Service Innovators Committee at The Mix. When I'm not doing my degree, in my spare time I love being creative and baking as well as going for walks.
Is there anything I can't ask?Joe wrote:
I'm passionate about supporting young people to keep themselves safe and to have their voices heard on safeguarding practices. At The Mix, my main role is overseeing our safeguarding practices. In my downtime, I'm a massive geek (RPGs, games and comics), but also equally happy in wild space chancing on butterflies.
We won't discuss real situations involving real people for privacy reasons, and we can't comment on other support services. You can ask questions on pretty much everything else.
If we don't know the answer to your question, we'll be honest and say that. We might be able to go away and research your question or point you in the direction of someone else who knows the answer.
The truth resists simplicity.
Post edited by JustV on
2
Comments
I have a question to ask that I had on my mind for a long time now. I'm genuinely curious.
If someone posts something worrying, like they are in danger of serious harm. What is the process of helping such person?
For example if I post something here on the boards that sounds like I'm in danger, what will happen next?
Kindest regards,
Jakub
Here is the first answer from @Liidia and @Joe to the question from @JJLemon18
.
Great question thank you so much for sharing @Morgan007. Can you share with us more about what you mean by varied? We'll then get this over to @Liidia and @Joe to answer your question
Sorry for the delay in our reply. Bank Holidays and staff leave have slowed down our replying time.
Across all services at the Mix (Helpline, Boards, Chat and Counselling) will open up confidential to another service that can help when in contact with you if:
1. We believe your life, or someone else’s, is in danger
2. We believe you are currently hurting someone else
3. You’re being seriously harmed by someone in a position of trust who is able to hurt other young people, like a teacher, religious leader, sports coach, police officer or doctor
More information can be found on this over on our website here: https://www.themix.org.uk/about-us/confidentiality
We take every case individually and will do a risk assessment (ask questions to find out how bad the risk is) then based on that information we compare that to those three points above. If we believe any of the three is true then we will be contacting other organisations to help that you.
It’s not the case that we have different rules for the different services. Also there is no blanket rule for self-harm or suicidal thoughts for when we do open up confidentiality. It all depends on the three points above for all of our service.
It also worth noting that a risk you contact us about is rarely in isolation, so there could be multiple risks involved such as self-harm and suicide. We will risk assess how these interact with each other for that you while comparing them to the three key points.
There may also be times where we don't have the full picture of someone's situation, and the information we do have gives us reason to believe they might not be safe. In those cases, we may involve emergency services just to be on the safe side.
So it could look like our reasons for calling emergency services vary, but when you get down to the specifics of individual situations, there tend to be details that change the risk level.
Additionally, The Mix services are a human operation, which means there will always be some variance in how we evaluate these things, but we try to be as consistent as possible.
(happy to clarify anything if these answers don't make sense!)
Thank you for this question. Sorry for the delay in answering. We are going to answer it in a few parts from our different perspectives:
As part of our volunteer training, we include how we do safeguarding here at The Mix. This is so our volunteers feel confident in our process and understand how our safeguarding works.
When a volunteer is on-shift, they can always call our On Call team. Our On Call team supports volunteers with decisions that need to be made such as contacting emergency services, and they can chat through anything that will help the volunteer. We also offer volunteers access to our Employee Assistance Programme which includes free short term counselling.
Additionally, we create a culture where discussions about safeguarding cases is encouraged, and that includes challenging decisions that are made. Another key part of that culture is the importance of self-care and being able to vent when needed.
It’s a bit of both, we do checking in and we look other each other as one big family.
There are people you can't see who help out behind the scenes. Our supervisors support moderators with anything difficult and make sure they have a space to offload if they need to. Our more experienced moderators train up our newer moderators, and we often chat through difficult moderation decisions as a team rather than making those calls individually.
We also encourage moderators to take time off when they need it, and we have some rules in place to make sure nobody is doing too much. Burnout and vicarious trauma are common issues for people who work in emotional support and moderation, and we're always doing our best to watch out for that and make sure everyone is healthy.
Moderators also have spaces to chat amongst themselves (including social spaces), and ways to reach the staff team directly with anything on their mind. We're pretty well connected to each other which helps create a supportive space.
When The Mix check in with me if I've been away or MIA, I always get a check in message from staff. Super informal and just to check if I'm okay. Because The Mix is so good at talking about wellbeing, mental health, cultural or financial things, they create a safe space to be honest about whatever might be going on for without contributing to stigma.
What you said about us being one big family is truly accurate! I sing The Mix's praises to everyone - family, friends, anyone.
When people report heavy posts (e.g. about abuse), it tends to be for these reasons: For those first two reasons, the moderator who picks up the report will check your post. They'll see if it needs a trigger warning and add one if it does, and they might edit or delete the post if it breaks the community guidelines. We'll send you a DM if any changes are made.
For the third reason (if someone is worried about you), we'll also look to see if you're in crisis, or in rare cases, whether your life might be at risk. If we think you might benefit from some additional support we'll drop you a DM with some signposts, maybe some questions about how you're feeling, etc.