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Safeguarding

How the anti-trafficking tools on Bible Study Helper protect the people who use them.

Last updated 26 September 2026.

What the tools are for

Bible Study Helper is a free, anonymous Bible question site in 35 languages, used mostly in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Its safety tools help people check a job offer before they pay or travel, ask for help privately, turn what they witnessed into a report for a hotline, keep emergency numbers with them abroad, and find hope after exploitation. We are a front door: we point people to police, emergency services, hotlines, embassies and aid organisations. We do not investigate, rescue, or monitor anyone.

Principles

Safety before everything. In danger, people are told to call local emergency services first. A Quick exit button (and the Esc key) closes the tools and clears the screen; on help pages it leaves the site.
Help never depends on faith. Faith is offered, never required. The private chat deliberately does not preach.
The AI never gives a phone number or a link. Every number shown comes from our own directory, and our servers remove any number or link the AI writes, so a model cannot invent a number for someone in danger.
The AI is honest about what it is. It says it is an AI, not a person, a hotline or an emergency service. It never calls a job "safe" — only "no warning signs found in what you shared", with advice to check independently.
Nothing to trace. No sign-up, no name, no email, no phone number. We do not store IP addresses. Help pages use no cookies, no storage and no third-party scripts.
We keep as little as possible — see below.
No one is named or accused. Reports and warnings describe behaviour and patterns, never identifiable people.

What we keep

What	Kept?
Text or screenshots put into the job-offer check, private chat or witness report	Not stored. Sent to our server and to our AI provider (OpenAI) only to write the answer. OpenAI's published API terms say API data is not used to train its models and may be retained for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring.
Everyday Bible questions that seem to describe trafficking, abuse or self-harm	The words are not stored and never sent to analytics providers. Only an anonymous count remains.
Use of the tools	Anonymous counts only: which tool, language, country, risk level and types of warning sign. No visitor or session identifier, no text.
Job offers a person chooses to share "to warn others"	Only with a ticked consent box. The text (and any contact numbers in it) is kept for up to 12 months to spot repeated scams, then deleted automatically. Patterns — never the person's identity — may be shared with anti-trafficking organisations.
Safe Journey Card	Made on the person's phone. Never sent to us.
Morning verse notification (optional)	Only if someone taps "Send me a verse every morning" and allows notifications: the push address their browser gives us, their language and send hour. The notification itself carries no data; the phone fetches the day's verse. Turning notifications off for the site deletes it at the next send. No name, number or IP.
Daily verse on Telegram (optional)	Only if someone subscribes: their Telegram chat number, language and delivery time, so the bot can send the verse. Sending /stop — or blocking the bot — deletes it. Questions asked in Telegram are not linked to it.

Help numbers

Numbers come only from our directory of 76 countries (emergency services, national anti-trafficking and child helplines where one clearly exists, official recruitment-licence registries and embassy pages). Where a language is spoken across many countries, we do not guess one country's hotline; we show the local emergency number and the Global Modern Slavery Directory instead. Each entry is marked unverified until a person confirms it: emergency numbers are checked against official government sources (never test-called); helplines are called to confirm the number, hours and languages; links are opened on a phone. Confirmed entries show a ✓; a helpline that fails the check is removed until fixed. Links are re-checked monthly.

Status: verification is in progress (137 entries). Until an entry is verified, the tools always add: "If a number doesn't work, call your local emergency number or use the global directory."

How we check accuracy

We test the tools against written cases before and after every change, using our own evaluation sets (kept in the code repository). Latest results, 26 September 2026:

Test	Result
Job-offer check: realistic scam offers in 8 languages (fees to the worker, personal accounts, kept passports, visit visas, scam-compound jobs, sexual exploitation, child recruitment…)	30 of 30 caught, all rated high risk
Job-offer check: fair, legal job offers	0 of 16 wrongly flagged
Job-offer check: warning signs a careful reader would expect	59 of 64 found
Question screening: people describing exploitation, abuse or self-harm in 10 languages	18 of 18 caught
Question screening: ordinary questions, including questions about slavery, trafficking and suicide	0 of 16 flagged after the latest fix
Question screening on 300 real, recent questions from the site	0 of 300 flagged (none described exploitation or self-harm; the first run wrongly flagged 2 questions about depression — fixed)

Each test found something we then fixed: rules that ignored "no placement fee" or "you keep your passport", a keyword net that flagged general questions about suicide or trafficking, and questions about depression receiving a message meant for exploitation (people who mention self-harm now receive their own message).

Children

Recruiting children, or asking someone to lie about their age, is always treated as a serious warning sign. Child helplines are listed where a national one clearly exists. We never ask for age, name or location.

Human review and partners

Shared offers are reviewed by a person before any pattern leaves the platform. We are seeking partnerships with established anti-trafficking organisations and hotlines so that reports and patterns reach people who can act on them, under written data-sharing agreements.

Languages

The tools are available in 35 languages. Their text was written carefully but has not yet been reviewed by native speakers in every language; that review is under way, starting with the languages most used by labour migrants.

Concerns and contact

If you see a mistake — a wrong number, a harmful answer, or a translation problem — please tell us: [email protected]. We correct safety issues first. See also our Terms and Privacy Policy.