Rules of Procedure – Fathers' Inquiry

These rules describe what Fathers' Inquiry does with an account from the moment someone applies to the moment a recording is published, and what it will not do at any point.

They are published in full, before anyone applies, because there is no panel and no named witness to vouch for this material. What vouches for it is that the process is written down in advance, applied the same way every time, and open to anyone who wants to check it against what was published.

1. What Fathers' Inquiry Is Not

It is not a court or a tribunal. It cannot summon anyone, compel a document, or put a question to anyone who has not agreed to answer it. It cannot administer an oath and does not claim to. It makes no finding about whether an account is true, and it is not able to. Nothing it publishes is evidence in any proceeding. Nothing it publishes is legal advice.

2. Who May Give Testimony

Testimony is currently taken from fathers in the United States and Canada only. This is a limit of what can be checked responsibly, not a judgement about anywhere else.

Matters that cannot be accepted, in every case and without exception:

Any matter where a child protection or child intervention agency was a party, in jurisdictions where publication about such proceedings is restricted.
Any family matter heard in a court whose governing statute restricts publication about its proceedings.
Any matter where a publication ban, non-disclosure order, gag order, or a confidentiality or non-disparagement clause applies to the applicant.
Any matter where proceedings are ongoing and speaking publicly could affect them.
Any account accompanied by a recording of a court proceeding, from any jurisdiction, however lawfully it was made.
Any account already told publicly under the applicant's own name. What is already public cannot be made anonymous afterwards.

"I don't think there is an order" is not an answer. Where an order or a clause might apply, FI requires either the document or written confirmation from the applicant's own lawyer. This is not distrust. Most people do not know precisely what their own order says, and the consequence of being wrong falls on the applicant, not on FI.

3. Applying

Applications are made through the form on this site. Applying is not selection, and most applications do not become a recording. Two people run this, and the number of recordings possible in a year is small.

Every applicant receives a reply from a person, including those who are declined.

Where an application is declined, what was sent is deleted. This is said here, before anyone applies, so that nobody learns it afterwards.

The assessment looks at four things: whether the account falls within scope; whether publication would be safe for the applicant and his children; whether the account can be told without identifying anyone; and whether it is supported by documents.

Screening decisions are recorded, with who made them, when, and on what basis.

Fathers' Inquiry will not advise anyone on his own position. It cannot tell an applicant whether it is safe for him to speak. It does not know his case, it is not his lawyer, and a wrong answer from FI would be paid for by him.

4. The Statement of Truth

Before the interview, a witness signs a statement that his account is true to the best of his knowledge and belief. It is signed before an independent verifier, who confirms the witness's identity and that documents said to exist do exist.

This is not an oath. Fathers' Inquiry is not a tribunal and cannot administer one. Calling it an oath would misdescribe both what it is and what follows from breaking it.

Fathers' Inquiry does not hold the witness's identity. The verifier confirms it; FI receives an attestation that verification happened, with a reference and a date, and a pseudonym. This is deliberate: what is not held cannot be lost, compelled, or leaked.

5. Recording

Recording is private. There is no audience, no live broadcast, and nothing is transmitted anywhere as it happens.

The questions appear on screen. The witness answers them in order. This is what replaces a panel's questioning, and it is why the questions are published below rather than described.

Concealment is achieved at capture, not afterwards: silhouette, backlighting, filming from behind, or audio over still images. Software blurring, pixelation and masking are not offered. Both are defeatable, and neither is anonymisation.

Where a voice needs altering, it is replaced rather than pitch-shifted. A pitch-shifted voice can be shifted back.

6. The Question Set

Every witness is asked these questions, in this order.

Other questions may be asked as well. No two cases are the same, and a set of questions written in advance cannot anticipate what a particular account turns on. Where something a witness has said needs following up, or where his case raises something this list does not reach, he will be asked about it.

A witness may decline any question, and does not have to give a reason. This applies to the published questions and to any additional one. Declining is not treated as evasion, it is not recorded as a refusal, it is not mentioned on the recording, and it makes no difference to whether the testimony is published. He may also stop the recording at any point.

Additional questions are visible to anyone watching, because the questions appear on screen as they are asked. Nothing is put to a witness off-camera and then edited to look like part of the published set.

Two rules govern every question, published or additional, and every follow-up. No question invites a witness to name anyone – not the other parent, a judge, a lawyer, an officer, a caseworker or an expert. No question invites details about a child, beyond the fact that a child exists and their age at the time.

Where an answer does name someone, it is generalised in the edit, or the passage is removed.

Part one: before

Before any of this began, what was your part in your child's daily life? Describe an ordinary week.
What changed first?
When did you first understand that contact with your child was at risk?

Part two: the process

What was the first step taken through a court or an agency, and who took it?
What were you told would happen next, and by whom – describing roles rather than names?
What actually happened, and how long did it take?
Were any findings made about you? You do not need to say what they were. Say whether they were tested, and how.
Did you have legal representation throughout? If it changed, what changed it?
Were there orders about contact? Describe what they provided for, not who made them.
What happened when an order was not followed?

Part three: the record

What documents do you have that describe what happened?
Is there anything in the record that you say is wrong? How do you know?
Did you ask for that to be corrected, and what happened?

Part four: effects

What has this cost you – in work, in health, in money, in the people around you?
How long has it been since you saw your child?
What did you do to keep going?

Part five: the answer to the standing question

Looking at what happened to you, what would you say to the question this Inquiry asks: are fathers and their children treated justly?
What single change to the process would have made the most difference to your case?
Is there anything you were not asked that you think matters?

What is not asked

The question set contains no question inviting a witness to say what anyone else intended, believed or wanted. Motive is not something a witness can know about another person, and an account that asserts it is an account that cannot be published.

7. Editing and De-identification

Every recording is edited before publication. Editing does two things.

It removes identifying material about the witness. Names, employers, schools, specific dates, and anything else that narrows to one person.

It removes identifying material about everyone he describes – the other parent, judges, lawyers, officers, caseworkers and experts. This is done by generalising the claim, not by removing names from it. "A court left a contact order unenforced for fourteen months" can be published. The same sentence naming the court, the judge and the county cannot, and muting the names does not fix it.

Where redaction is needed within audio, the audio is muted rather than bleeped, with padding either side of the removed material.

This has a consequence and it is not a small one. Some accounts cannot be published once generalised this far, because what remains no longer describes anything in particular. Fathers' Inquiry can show that a pattern exists. It cannot hold an individual to account, and it does not try to.

8. Checks Before Publication

No recording is published until all of the following are complete. They are listed so that a reader can ask whether they were done.

	Check
1	The editor removes identifying material against a list built during screening
2	A second review at normal speed, with captions, by someone who has not read the case file
3	An automated pass over the finished file, including its captions, metadata and thumbnail
4	Legal review
5	An attempt by an outsider to re-identify the witness using public tools
6	The witness watches the exact file that would be published and approves it

The second reviewer is never the person who edited it.

Three further reviews sit alongside these. Whether someone who knows the case could recognise it. Whether several published recordings together reconstruct one family. And whether the published transcript was generated from the edited recording and matches it, so that the video and the words cannot disagree.

A minimum of 30 days passes between recording and any possible publication.

No release date is announced in advance. A recording is published when these checks are complete, and not before. An announced date is pressure on a check.

Failing a check is a normal outcome. An account that cannot be published safely is not published, and the man who gave it is told why.

9. After Publication

Corrections. If something published is wrong, it is corrected and the correction is visible. The recording keeps its address, carries a note saying what changed, and the correction is applied to every copy, including copies on other platforms.

Withdrawal before publication – seven days, absolute. After a witness approves the exact file, he has seven days to withdraw for any reason or none. Nothing is published. There is no discussion and no persuasion.

Withdrawal after publication – fourteen days, and what is promised is FI's own conduct. On request within fourteen days, with no reason needed, Fathers' Inquiry will remove the recording from this site, write to every platform holding a copy asking for removal and record the date it asked, and leave a short notice at the recording's address rather than a dead link. After fourteen days, requests are considered and granted where there is a safeguarding reason.

What withdrawal cannot do. Fathers' Inquiry can remove a recording from this site and ask platforms hosting copies to remove theirs. It cannot retrieve what people have already downloaded, what others have quoted, or copies uploaded by people it has no relationship with. This is said before a witness records, not afterwards.

Increasing protection is always possible. Reducing it is not – including at the witness's own later request. A recording made anonymous cannot be made named afterwards, because doing so would expose a child and another parent who never agreed to any of it.

10. What Is Published About Refusals

Fathers' Inquiry publishes how many accounts it declined and, in categories, why.

A body that publishes nothing it is given, and never says so, is selecting for the most striking material and presenting the result as representative. The refusal rate is the cheapest check on that available, and it is one a reader can apply without trusting anyone.

11. Changes to These Rules

These rules will change as this work continues. When they do, the date of the change and what changed is recorded at the foot of this page. Rules that applied to a recording at the time it was made are not rewritten afterwards.