Subscribe to Rape Crisis Ireland
Sign up for RCI updates and news.
Rape Crisis Ireland is a registered charity in Ireland.
Registered Charity No: 20040963 (CHY 13236). Company Registration No: 363350.
This is the explanation participating Rape Crisis Centres give every survivor before they share information with a counsellor.
We’ve put the full version here so you can read it whenever suits you.
Your data:
- Your name, your age, your life story – these are personal to you. They are yours.
- You have rights over your own data, and we are committed to keeping it safe.
- We respect your right to privacy, and your right to make informed choices about how we collect, hold, or use your personal data.
Your rights:
- You have a right to know what we collect and what we do with it.
- You can ask to see your personal data which we hold.
- You can check the personal data is accurate and, if it is not, we must correct it.
- You can withdraw your consent at any time and tell us to stop collecting your personal data.
- You can ask us to delete your personal data.
Types of data
In Rape Crisis we collect and use two types of personal data from you:
- Administrative data
- Statistical data
Administrative data:
We collect minimal data to deliver our services to you e.g. your contact details so we can arrange appointments and your service history.
We promise to:
- Keep this data secure.
- Only hold it as long as we use it and delete it afterwards.
- Not use it for other purposes.
- Not share your name or details with anyone outside the Centre without your consent except when required by law, or if we need to so as to prevent injury to yourself or to someone else.(1)
Statistical data:
With your consent, we collect data about you and your experience of sexual violence. We hold and manage this data under layers of anonymity in Mosaic – the Rape Crisis Ireland (RCI) data system.
We will make sure that the data that we collect, hold, analyse, and share through Mosaic is safe, secure, and does not potentially identify you. We use this data to talk about sexual violence and our services generally through statistics and research.
Measures we use to protect your information:
- Your name is not used in Mosaic.
- We have technological security around Mosaic to prevent hacking or unauthorised access.
- The information is encrypted so that, even in the event of a breach, all the data is jumbled up and meaningless.
- We limit access to Mosaic by role and purpose.
Mosaic is used by participating centres only. If you’re not sure whether your centre uses Mosaic, that’s completely fine to ask. Every support service, whether or not it uses Mosaic, should be able to tell you clearly what happens to your information and what your rights are. Asking is not a challenge to them; it’s something we’d encourage with any service you use.
(1) These laws include the Children First Act 2015 child protection reporting requirements and any other exception set out in the Data Protection legislation (Section 8 Data Protection Act 1988 as amended).
Why share your story into Mosaic?
Through Mosaic, your story can become part of public evidence to challenge and drive policy, responses and prevention, without you ever having to speak out yourself.
This is only possible collectively; your solidarity lifts every survivor’s voice alongside your own. Through the collective voice the different experiences, the commonalities and the most vulnerable survivors’ experiences can be safely described.
With your data in Mosaic, you become an active part of the movement to create change and end sexual violence.
Rules for sharing data
We talk about and share information from your data in line with strict rules:
- We will make the general analysis available; we will never share your data on its own.
- We group potentially revealing data in bigger groups of data to protect you e.g. we don’t say ‘There are two people from Lithuania’; we say ‘There are 40 people from Eastern European countries’.
- If we share data for research purposes (e.g. with an academic researcher), it will be under a contract that ensures the protection of the data and our control over what happens to it at all times, including its deletion after an agreed period.
- RCI and Rape Crisis Centres share some information from the data with agencies, such as funders or state agencies. In order to protect your confidentiality, we only share groups of data e.g. “10% of all clients were aged between 20–25″.
Why do we collect data?
Mosaic data gives voice to the collective statistical story of survivors who use Rape Crisis services, and are a vital tool for ending sexual violence, improving services, and holding perpetrators to account. Consistent, comparable data is essential to shaping policy, service responses, and measuring the impact of reform. We work with member Rape Crisis Centres and outside experts to produce the high-quality, reliable data in Mosaic and our publications.
In the public interest, we routinely release our annual statistics and other reports and, capacity-permitting, respond to ad hoc queries on unpublished data.
Rape Crisis Centre Data Compliance Officers
Every Rape Crisis Centre (RCC) has a Data Compliance Officer (DCO), with a backup for when they’re unavailable.
The DCO is responsible for:
- Attending Mosaic training
- Liaising with RCI on the database, including any difficulties, and ensuring Face-to-Face,
- Appointment, Helpline, and Accompaniment data is entered
- Entering data themselves, or ensuring others in the RCC do so
- Ensuring data is regularly checked and cleaned
- Ensuring any mobile devices used to store database records are encrypted.
The DCO role is vital to accurate national statistics that reflect clients’ experiences and the range of services RCCs provide. It is thanks to their dedication that Mosaic is now recognised nationally and internationally as a vital tool in ending sexual violence.
Personal data and privacy
The collective story these statistics tell is built from individual survivors’ data – and we treat that trust with care. Personal data always remains confidential: in telling the collective story, we never reveal anyone’s identity.
Our commitment to confidentiality, and how it works in practice, is explained to each person when they use our services.
We also build in the latest information security, layers of anonymisation, limited access, and staff training in data governance.
For more information
Contact our Data & Privacy Manager, Sally Aquilina, at data@rcni.ie. Or contact the Data Compliance Officer in your local Rape Crisis Centre.