Helpline privacy and confidentiality

We know how important privacy and confidentiality are to survivors who are accessing our services.

We never record calls to our helpline. Sometimes a second member of our team may listen to the support worker’s side of the conversation while it is happening. This is for training purposes or to check that we are providing a good service and they will not hear you or what you are saying.

The helpline is not a long-term service, so our support workers do not take detailed notes of conversations. They will not make a note of your full name or contact details, even if you choose to share them.

If you ask us to make a referral on your behalf to another support service, we may take your name, phone number and location, in order to make this referral. We keep this information for seven days and then delete it.

For most of our support channels, if you contact us more than once, the support worker you speak to will not be able to see anything you have shared in previous conversations. The only exception is our webchat service.

When using webchat, you have the option to enter a code to let the support worker you’re chatting with view your most recent webchat conversation. If you choose not to enter that code, we won’t know you have used webchat before.

If you contact the helpline via text, email or webchat, your contacts will be held for seven days and then deleted. In some circumstances, we may hold anonymised transcripts for a maximum of 30 days to help us monitor the quality of our support.

Transcripts may be held by our virtual call centre service for up to three months - these records are restricted and can only be accessed by Rape Crisis Scotland upon written request and only in the circumstances outlined in our General Privacy Notice.