Witness Agreement – Fathers' Inquiry

This is the agreement between you and Fathers' Inquiry about the recording you are about to make.

It is written in plain language on purpose. If any part of it is unclear, ask before you sign. Do not sign it on the day of recording. Take it away, read it, and take your own legal advice on it if you can.

1. Who This Is With

Fathers' Inquiry is published by a small group of fathers, working independently. There is no company and no charity behind it, which matters to you because it tells you what you are dealing with: people in the same position as you, not an institution.

They are not named publicly, for the same reason you are not. This project removes identifying detail about everyone in an account, and applying a weaker standard to the people doing the removing would be inconsistent. Purpose & Structure explains it.

Who you are contracting with is not disclosed to you, and you should understand what that means before you sign.

The protections in this document run one way. Fathers' Inquiry promises not to publish your name, to let you withdraw, to delete your application if it is declined, and to take a recording down on request. If you cannot identify who made those promises, enforcing them against anyone is difficult. You would be relying on Fathers' Inquiry keeping its word rather than on your ability to make it.

That is a real limitation and it is stated here rather than left for you to notice. Some people will read it and decide not to testify. That is a reasonable decision and nobody will try to talk you out of it.

What you do get, and can check before signing: the whole process is published in the Rules of Procedure, the questions are published in full, corrections are made publicly, and there is a contact route at contact@fathersinquiry.com that a person reads. You are being asked to judge this project by what it does in the open, because that is what is on offer.

2. What We Will Do

Record you privately, answering a published set of questions shown on screen. We may also ask you other questions, because your case may raise something the published list does not reach. Any additional question follows the same rules: it will not ask you to name anyone and it will not ask about details that identify your children.

You can decline any question, published or not, and you do not have to give a reason. Declining is not treated as evasion, it is not mentioned on the recording, and it does not affect whether your testimony is published. You can stop the recording at any point, and you can ask for something you have already said to be left out.
Edit the recording to remove material that identifies you.
Edit it again to remove material that identifies anyone you describe – the other parent, judges, lawyers, officers, caseworkers and experts – by generalising what you said rather than by cutting names out of it.
Put it through the checks set out in the Rules of Procedure, including a review by someone who has not read your file and an attempt by an outsider to work out who you are.
Show you the exact recording that would be published.
Publish it only if you approve it and only after at least 30 days have passed.

At any of those stages we may decide not to publish. That is a normal outcome. If it happens we will tell you why.

3. What You Are Agreeing To

That we may record you, edit that recording, and publish the edited version on this site.
That we may publish it with a transcript, a written summary, and a note saying what we were able to check and what we were not.
That we may publish only parts of what you record. Most recordings are shortened. Some sections are removed because they identify someone, some because they cannot be checked, and some for length. What is published may be a small part of what you said, and we choose which part. You approve the exact edit before it goes out, so you will always see what was kept before you agree to it.
That we may copy it to other platforms, such as video sites, after it is published here.
That we may keep it published permanently, as part of a public record.
That we may correct it later, and say publicly that we have.

You keep the ownership of your own account. What you are giving us is permission to publish it in these ways.

4. What You Are Telling Us Is True

By signing, you are telling us:

Your account is true, to the best of your knowledge and belief.
No court order, publication ban, settlement clause or agreement prevents you from speaking about this matter. If you are not certain, you have told us so, and you have shown us the document or your lawyer's written confirmation.
Proceedings in your matter have concluded.
You have not already told this story publicly under your own name.
You will not name your children or give details that identify them.
You are the person you say you are, and the documents you have shown us are genuine.

You will sign a separate statement of truth before the interview, in front of an independent verifier. It is not an oath – we are not a court and cannot administer one.

5. The Risks You Are Accepting

This is the most important section of this agreement. If you read nothing else, read this.

You may be recognised

We remove your name and the names of everyone you describe. We generalise the details of your case. We check the result more than once, including by asking someone who does not know your case to try to work out who you are.

None of that prevents recognition by people who already know what happened to you. Your former partner knows your case. So may her lawyer, the caseworker, people at your workplace, and your family. They do not need your name. They need one detail that they recognise, and an account of your own life is made of details that you recognise.

We will not promise you protection we cannot deliver. What we can tell you is what we do. Whether it holds against someone who already knows your case is not something we control.

If you show your face, assume you will be recognised

Concealing your face is your choice. If you choose not to conceal it, understand what that means: it defeats a search for your name and nothing else. Anyone who has met you will know you. Treat a recording with your face in it as a recording that may be seen by anyone who knows you, at any point in the future.

It is permanent, and it travels

Once a recording is published it can be downloaded, quoted and re-uploaded by people we have no relationship with and no power over. We can remove our copy and ask other platforms to remove theirs. We cannot retrieve what has already been taken.

Assume that what you say will still be findable in twenty years, and that you cannot take it back.

It may affect your life

Speaking publicly about family proceedings can affect employment, relationships, and how people treat you. It may affect your relationship with your children when they are older and read it. It may provoke a response from people you describe, including legal action against you.

We cannot assess your position for you

We do not know your case, we are not your lawyer, and we will not tell you whether doing this is wise for you. We will decline an account where we can see a problem. We cannot see everything, and a decision to go ahead is yours.

You are strongly advised to take independent legal advice before signing. It is not a condition of testifying. Fathers' Inquiry does not pay for it and does not offer to.

You accept these risks

By signing you are confirming that you have read this section, that you understand these risks, and that you accept them. You are choosing to do this knowing that recognition is possible, that publication is permanent, and that the consequences in your own life are yours.

6. What We Do Not Promise

We do not promise that you will not be identified. We do not promise that publishing will achieve anything. We do not promise to publish at all, even after recording. We do not promise that your recording will remain available on any other platform. We give no legal advice, and nothing we say to you is legal advice.

Where we describe what we do, we are describing our process, not guaranteeing its result.

7. Responsibility for What You Say

What you choose to say is yours. We can edit and generalise it. We cannot know whether it is true, and we do not check it against anyone else's account of the same events.

You are responsible for the truthfulness of your account.
You are responsible for having told us accurately about orders, bans and clauses that apply to you.
If you tell us something that is untrue, or conceal a restriction that applies to you, and someone is harmed as a result or brings a claim, you are responsible for that and you agree to cover the cost to us of dealing with it.

This does not cover our own mistakes. If we cause harm through our own editing, our own writing, or our own failure to follow our published process, that is ours and not yours.

8. Changing Your Mind

You see the exact recording before it goes out, and nothing is published without your approval.

Before publication, you have seven days. After you approve the exact recording, you have seven days to change your mind for any reason or none. Nothing is published. We will not try to talk you out of it.

After publication, you have fourteen days, and here is exactly what that means. On your request, with no reason needed, we will take the recording off this site, write to every platform holding a copy and ask them to remove it, record the date we asked, and leave a short notice where the recording was rather than a dead link. After fourteen days we will still consider a request and will act on it where there is a safeguarding reason.

What we cannot do is retrieve copies other people already hold. We are promising what we will do, because that is what we control. We are not promising that every copy disappears, because that is not ours to promise.

You can always ask us to increase your protection. You cannot ask us to reduce it – including later, including if you change your mind about being anonymous. Reducing it would expose your child and the other parent, who never agreed to any of this.

9. Money

We do not pay you, and you do not pay us. If we have agreed to reimburse a documented expense, that is separate and is not a payment for your account.

10. Your Information

Your application and the material you send us are held in a form our website cannot read. The un-edited recording is kept separately, encrypted, and is never published.

We do not hold your legal name. The independent verifier confirms who you are; what reaches us is a confirmation that verification happened, and a pseudonym.

Our Privacy Policy sets out the rest.

11. If Something Goes Wrong Between Us

Talk to us first. Most problems are a misunderstanding about what was agreed, and we would rather fix it than argue about it.

12. Signing

Sign only if all of these are true:

You have read this whole document, including §5.
You have had the chance to take your own legal advice.
Nobody has pressured you, and you are not doing this because you feel you owe anyone anything.
You understand that you may be recognised, that publication is permanent, and that the consequences in your own life are yours.
You are doing this because you have decided to.

How this gets signed, and when

This page is the copy you read. It is not a form and there is nothing here to fill in. Do not print it, do not sign it, and do not send it to us. If you did, your name would arrive in an ordinary mailbox, which is the one thing this whole process is arranged to avoid.

Signing happens much later, and only if your application gets that far. Most do not.

Where. In the same meeting as your statement of truth, in front of an independent verifier – someone who is not us. They confirm you are who you say you are, and they witness you signing.

What we receive. Not this document with your name on it. The verifier sends us a confirmation that a person whose identity they checked signed it, on what date, and under which pseudonym. We never hold your legal name, which means we cannot disclose it, lose it, or be made to hand it over.

What you receive. Your own copy, and you keep it. Hold on to it. We are not named on this site, so your copy is the record of what you were promised – see §1, which explains what that costs you and why it is worth thinking about before you sign anything.

What you decide at that meeting, and not before:

the pseudonym your account is published under;
whether your face is concealed at capture, having read §5.

Neither is decided by filling in a box on a website, and neither is settled until you have had the chance to ask a person about it.