Parent, educator, and youth-programme guide
Teen Digital-Safety Facilitator Guide
Use Connected Without Compromise in a family, classroom, library, team, club, counselling, or youth-programme setting without turning safety education into surveillance or shame.
1. Establish the no-shame response first
A teenager is more likely to disclose a dangerous mistake when immediate safety is separated from later, proportionate consequences.
- Say in advance that safety comes before punishment.
- Do not require a complete retelling before stabilising immediate risk.
- Avoid public confrontation, forced posting, or redistribution of harmful material.
- Explain any reporting duty and keep the teen involved whenever safety allows.
- Name the next check-in time so the first report is not treated as the end of support.
2. Select the right learning route
Start with the shared safety backbone, then use the Core, Creator, Gamer, or AI route that matches the learner's real exposure.
- Use the Core route for account, privacy, scam, grooming, harassment, and recovery foundations.
- Use Creator Mode for filming, livestreaming, moderation, collaborations, sponsorships, and creator-business pressure.
- Use Gamer Mode for voice chat, Discord, virtual economies, esports, doxxing, swatting, and sustainable play.
- Use AI Mode for hallucinations, privacy, deepfakes, companions, agents, bias, authorship, and human oversight.
- Return to the shared five-step backbone whenever the specialist terminology is hard to recall.
3. Practise decisions, not slogans
Scenarios, retrieval practice, and short drills make the response usable when stress narrows attention.
- Ask for the safest first move, not a perfect solution.
- Identify what evidence is useful and what should not be copied or forwarded.
- Name the adult, platform, school, bank, service, or authority able to act.
- Repeat the scenario later without notes to strengthen recall.
- Debrief what made the decision difficult without asking learners to disclose personal incidents.
4. Protect privacy while teaching safety
Education should not create a second record of a young person's private experiences or invite unnecessary disclosure.
- Do not ask learners to disclose personal incidents in a group.
- Use fictional composites and optional private reflection.
- Collect only information required by the organisation's safeguarding duties.
- Keep academy progress local to the learner's browser unless an adult-run programme has a documented reason and consent process.
- Set a deletion schedule for any attendance or programme records that must be kept.
5. Build a living response plan
Platform interfaces and policies change, but a clear plan for pausing, saving, securing, telling, reporting, and following up remains useful.
- Record trusted adults in more than one setting.
- Keep official account-recovery and reporting links available.
- Schedule periodic account, privacy, payment, and notification reviews.
- Use the series update centre before relying on a platform-specific instruction.
- Record what changed after a drill so the response plan remains usable rather than merely filed away.