Our promise for the moments that matter most.
One question, asked of every message on its way to the other parent: is the sender, in this message, threatening to physically hurt someone — the other parent, their partner, another adult, or a child? A threat to hit, attack, injure or kill, a threat to come to someone to confront them, or unmistakable veiled physical menace. When a message plausibly means physical harm, it is held rather than delivered, and a person reads it.
The check is narrow on purpose, and being honest about its edges matters more than sounding comprehensive. It does nothold insults, abuse, name-calling, anger or swearing; it does not hold legal or custody threats, financial threats, or threats to withhold the children; it does not hold vague menace like “you’ll regret this”. Those are passed on, with the tone rewritten and both versions kept on your record. It also does not treat a report that something already happened as a live threat — that is a disclosure to pass on, not a message to withhold. And a child hurt or ill is urgent news, never something to hold up.
Two further things we would rather you knew than discovered. The check runs more than one model, because a single one was seen to miss a real threat. And if it cannot run at all, the message is passed on and marked for review rather than held — stopping every family’s messages during an outage would do more harm than the rare case it would catch.
It is not delivered, and it does not quietly disappear: it stays on the record, and it is raised to a person to read and decide on. We do not run a 24-hour rota and we do not promise you a response time — we would rather tell you that than publish a target we cannot stand behind. Depending on what is there, that person may pass the message on, contact either parent, or point you to specialist help (NSPCC 0808 800 5000 · Family Lives 0808 800 2222 · Refuge 0808 2000 247 · Samaritans 116 123).
Where a message discloses a criminal offence — a credible threat of violence, for example — we may report it to the police, as our privacy notice explains. Our commitment is to tell the parents involved when we have done that, unless telling them would increase the risk to someone.
We will not use safety as a reason to read beyond what was flagged, we will not take sides between parents under cover of it, and we will not delete anything. Your record cannot be erased — not by either parent and not by us — and the wording you wrote, with the digest taken when we received it, can never be altered. That is deliberate: a record that can be tidied is not a record.
Parents under strain write raw things. Swearing and anger on their own are not treated as a safeguarding concern; they are rewritten and passed on, and what you originally wrote stays on your record alongside what was actually sent. If you have written something you do not want passed on, tell us — but do not assume it has been held.