How We Protect People – Fathers' Inquiry

Telling your story should not cost you your privacy, your children's privacy, or your position in a court case. So before you tell us anything, here is exactly what we do with it – and, just as important, what we cannot do.

Please read the last section. It is the one that matters most.

Where we are

Fathers' Inquiry has not yet recorded or published any testimony. The first recordings take place in November 2026.

This page sets out the process we apply. If you testify in this first cycle, you will be among the first people it is applied to, and we would rather you knew that before you decide.

Your name is never published

Not as a choice you make. As a rule we apply to everyone.

No testimony on this site carries the witness's legal name. There is no option to be named, no "named tier", and no version of this where being named gets your story more attention. Every account is treated the same way, so that no single account stands out and no two can be matched against each other.

We remove identifying details, not just names

A name is the easiest thing to remove and the least useful on its own. A story can identify someone perfectly well with no name in it at all.

So before anything is published, we go through the recording, the audio and the written transcript and remove:

every name – yours, your children's, the other parent's, new partners, relatives
dates of birth, and ages given precisely
the number, sex and birth order of your children
addresses, towns, neighbourhoods and named regions
the court, its location, the case number and the hearing dates
schools, hospitals, placements, and anything that identifies them
employers, workplaces and occupations
doctors, therapists and other treating professionals
distinctive facts – an unusual injury, an unusual job, anything that was in the news

We mute these rather than bleeping them, because a bleep announces that a name was there.

We remove the other people in your story too

This is the part most people do not expect, so we want to be clear about it.

We also remove the identifying details of everyone you talk about – the other parent, the judge, the lawyers, the police officers, the caseworkers, the experts. Not just their names: the county, the court, the agency, the dates, and the procedural details that would let someone work out who they are.

We know this is frustrating. You came to be heard about specific things done by specific people, and we are asking you to describe what happened without pointing at who did it.

We do it for three reasons, and the first one is about you:

Because identifying them identifies you. In a family case, the people in your story and you are the same puzzle. Leaving them in place would undo everything else on this page.
Because your children are identified through the adults around them. Your name, or the other parent's, is your child's name as far as anyone who knows the family is concerned.
Because an account that accuses a named person is a legal claim, and a claim has to be proved. We cannot prove what happened in your case, and neither can you without disclosing far more than is safe for anyone.

What we can do instead is publish what happened, and count how often it happens. "A court left a contact order unenforced for fourteen months" is something we can say, and something a pattern can be built from. A pattern across many accounts is harder to dismiss than any single accusation.

What this means honestly: Fathers' Inquiry can show that something is happening. It cannot hold any individual person to account. If what you want is a specific named person held responsible, this is not the place for that, and we would rather tell you now.

Your face and voice

Your face. You choose. If you would rather not be seen, we do not film your face at all – we record you in silhouette, backlit, from behind, or as audio over a still image. We do not film your face and then blur it afterwards, because software blurring and pixelation can fail on a single frame and can be partly reversed. Nothing can leak from a recording that never captured it.

Please understand what showing your face means. If you choose to appear on camera, removing your name protects you against someone searching for it and nothing else. Anyone who knows you will recognise you immediately, and image search can find you. Most of the protection on this page depends on not being seen.

Your voice. If you want it changed, we use voice conversion rather than simply raising or lowering the pitch, because pitch shifting can be undone. We will tell you honestly that changing your voice takes something away from your testimony. In some cases an actor reads your words instead.

You see the final version, and you approve it

Nothing is published until you have watched the exact file that will go out – not a draft, not a description – and told us to publish it.

After you approve it, we wait at least 48 hours before publishing, so you can change your mind without having to argue about it. If you say stop, we stop. You do not have to give a reason.

We hold everything for at least 30 days between recording and publication. Nothing is ever live, so nothing is ever said in public that cannot be taken back.

Who sees your testimony before it goes out

As few people as possible. Nobody sees your recording who has not first signed a confidentiality undertaking.

Before anything is published it is checked more than once, and the second check is always done by someone who has not worked on your recording. Someone who has read every testimony also checks whether yours could be matched to your case, and whether several testimonies together could point at one family. If any of those checks fails, we do not publish. That happens, and when it does it is not a judgement about you or your account.

Children

We never publish a child's name, image, voice, school, or medical or psychological records. This is not a preference and it is not something a parent can waive on a child's behalf, because the child cannot consent and the parent is a party to the dispute being described.

If we cannot tell your story without your children becoming identifiable, we will not publish it.

The original recording

We keep the unedited recording. We keep it encrypted, we log every access to it, and it is never uploaded to any public platform. Only the edited version ever leaves.

We keep it rather than destroying it because if anyone ever claims we changed what you said, the original is the answer, and because destroying records when you expect to be challenged causes its own problems. We will tell you in writing how long we keep it, and on what terms, before you record anything.

What we cannot do

Please read this part twice. It is the most important section on this page, and everything above depends on it.

We cannot stop people who already know your case from recognising it. Your former partner, her lawyer, the judge, the caseworker and your own family will very likely know it is you within the first minute. Removing your name protects you from strangers, employers, neighbours and search engines. It does not protect you from the people already involved in your case. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

We cannot protect you from your own court case. If your matter is live or reopens, the other side may put your testimony in front of the court, and a court may draw conclusions from it. Anonymity does not prevent that. A court can also order you to hand over your own copies and your correspondence with us.

We cannot promise anonymity against a court order. If a court orders disclosure of something we hold, we will tell you and we will take advice on resisting it – but we cannot promise the outcome, and we will not pretend we can. Assume that anything we hold could one day be ordered out of our hands, and decide what to tell us on that basis.

We cannot protect you if you have already told this story publicly. If your case is on YouTube or a blog under your own name, an anonymous account of the same case identifies itself. We check for this, and if we find it we will not be able to publish your testimony anonymously.

We cannot undo a mistake that has been copied. Once a video is published and mirrored, we can take down our copy and ask others to take down theirs, but we cannot guarantee that every copy disappears. This is exactly why we hold, check, and check again before anything goes out.

We are not a court, a law firm or a charity, and we do not give legal advice. We cannot tell you whether it is safe for you to speak.

Before you apply, get your own advice

If there is any order, agreement or clause in your case that restricts what you may say – a publication ban, a confidentiality or non-disparagement clause in a consent order or settlement, or anything a lawyer has told you not to discuss – speaking publicly could put you in breach of it, and nothing on this page changes that.

Those clauses usually bind you whether or not the publication identifies you. Some of them are breached simply by telling us.

So take your own independent legal advice before you record anything – from someone you choose, in your own state or province, who is advising you and nobody else. Not our lawyer. Yours.

We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. We cannot tell you whether it is safe for you to speak, and we will not guess. We would rather lose a testimony than have a man harmed by giving one.

If we say no

We turn down testimony regularly – because of an order we cannot work around, because a case cannot be described without identifying a child, or because the account cannot be de-identified and still make sense.

If that happens, we will tell you why, we will delete what you sent us, and we will point you towards people who can help. It is not a judgement about whether we believe you.

Questions about any of this: contact@fathersinquiry.com. If you want to know more about how we decide what to publish, our Publication and Correction Policy sets it out in full.