Child Safety Standards

The standard

Child sexual abuse and exploitation material, in any form, is absolutely prohibited in Koinonia. So is any attempt to groom, solicit, sexualise, or arrange to meet a child, and so is any content that presents a child in a sexual way, whether it is a photograph, a drawing, a generated image, or words.

This is not a rule that is weighed against anything else. There is no context in which it bends, no account too old or too established to lose, and no report of it that is treated as a small matter.

Who Koinonia is for

Koinonia is not built for children and is not offered to them. An account should not be created by anyone under 13, or under the age of digital consent where they live, which is 16 across much of Europe.

The feed, the one place where a reader can put words in front of people they have not met, is the part of this app where that matters most.

Reporting, in the app

There is a report control on every post on the feed, needing one press and a reason. It is not buried in a menu, and every post is read by an automatic check before anybody else can see it at all.

Reporting somebody blocks the two of you permanently and at once, everywhere in the app, so neither of you sees the other again.

Anything concerning a child can also be sent directly to [email protected], from inside or outside the app, by anybody, including someone who has no account here.

What happens to a report

Every report is read by a person. Reports naming a child are read first, ahead of everything else in the queue.

Where child sexual abuse material is found, the account is removed immediately and permanently, the evidence is preserved rather than deleted, and it is reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and to the police in the relevant country. The account holder is not warned in advance, and no appeal reopens it.

Where grooming or solicitation is found, the same removal follows, and the same referral is made where there is any identifiable child at risk.

How the app is built to limit the risk

Calls are not recorded and no stranger can find you by name, by search, or by choosing you. Pairing is by nearness in Scripture and nothing else, so nobody can select a particular person to reach.

The camera and the microphone are off until the person using the app turns them on, and every session works as text alone.

Reporting blocks permanently and immediately rather than after review, so the person reporting is protected before anybody has read the report.

A report is kept even after the account it concerns is deleted. This is the one thing on the deletion page that survives a deletion request, and it exists precisely so that somebody who harms a child cannot erase the record by starting again.

The law

Koinonia complies with the child safety laws of Romania, where it is operated, with the child sexual abuse reporting obligations that apply to online services in the European Union, and with the reporting requirements of any other country where a report arises.

Who to contact

The child safety point of contact for Koinonia is reachable at [email protected]. Anything sent there about a child is answered by a person, and it is the address to use for a question from a regulator, a platform, or a law enforcement officer as well as from a reader.

If a child is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number first. This app cannot do that part, and no report here is a substitute for it.