YOUTH SAFEGUARDING
Youth Safeguarding & Child Protection Standard
Child-protection rules beyond privacy: adult-to-youth communications, media, programs, reporting, schools, and restrictions on future personalized AI involving minors.
Status: Current governance standard for applicable RTH public operations. Product-specific controls apply when the relevant product or program is enabled.
1. Purpose
This standard supplements the Youth Privacy Policy. Privacy governs information; safeguarding governs how RTH staff, contractors, volunteers, partners, technology, programs, and communications interact with minors and other vulnerable participants.
2. Adult-supported public experience
Heart Hero stories and public educational content may be used by children, but public RTH contact, purchasing, program inquiries, partnership, and pilot pathways remain adult-directed unless a separately approved youth workflow states otherwise.
3. One-to-one contact
RTH programs should avoid unmonitored private one-to-one digital communication between an adult acting for RTH and a minor. Approved youth programs should use parent/guardian, school, team, or organizational channels and retain communication records appropriate to the program.
4. Images, audio, and video
RTH will not publish an identifiable minor's image, audio, video, testimonial, full name, school/location details, or personal story without appropriate authority, program review, and consent/release where required. Child content should avoid exposing precise schedules or locations.
5. Physical programs
In-person programs must use role clarity, supervision appropriate to the activity, emergency procedures, appropriate adult-to-youth boundaries, and applicable screening/background-check requirements. RTH does not treat completion of a curriculum as medical, psychological, or athletic clearance.
6. Mandatory reporting and safety escalation
Personnel must follow applicable mandatory-reporting law and program-specific escalation procedures when they reasonably suspect abuse, neglect, exploitation, self-harm risk, threats, or another serious safety concern. RTH educational programs are not emergency-monitoring services.
7. Personalized AI and minors
General-purpose personalized conversational AI that processes personal or sensitive context is adult-first. RTH will not launch a minor-facing personalized AI/LLM experience unless a youth-specific design has passed privacy, parent/guardian or institutional authorization, child-development, bias, accessibility, safeguarding, data-retention, and RTH safety evaluation.
8. Prohibited youth profiling
RTH does not use public youth programs to assign scores for a child's worth, character, mental health, disability risk, discipline, resilience, or readiness. A future research instrument involving minors requires a separate protocol, consent/assent process where appropriate, professional review, and clear limitation on use.
9. Schools and organizations
Institutional youth programs require written role allocation for data control, parent/guardian notices or consent where required, school/student privacy obligations, authorized users, record retention, breach notice, acceptable communications, and incident escalation.
10. Complaints and incidents
Youth privacy or safeguarding concerns may be reported through the RTH contact or privacy channel. Serious immediate safety concerns should be directed to appropriate emergency or protective authorities rather than relying on an RTH website mailbox.
Privacy and data requests: privacy@restartingtheheart.com. Do not send medical records, passwords, authentication codes, government identifiers, or other unnecessary sensitive information by ordinary email.
General questions may use the RTH contact page.