Queer for Parents
What is The QYC?
The QYC is a community of young gay, lesbian and bisexual people. Realizing that you are gay or bisexual is a very confusing and profound experience, and despite strong family ties it is often very challenging for young people to have an open dialogue with their family. This may be because think they will be met with a negative reaction or treated differently if their families knew about their secret.
The service we provide is the possibly to interact online with other young people in the same position. The QYC is not a dating website or a website that people should use to arrange meetings in real life. The QYC is an open source website and is managed by the community of people who use it
I am surprised to find my son/daughter using The QYC!
Discovering that your child is having problems or is asking questions that you were not aware of can often come as a surprise. There are many websites and organisations that exist for parents to help them in these situations.
If you are a parent and have a question about The QYC or are concerned about specific behaviour of your child or of another user on this site, please get in touch with us at speakout@theqyc.com
Safety on the Internet and The QYC
The most important task we have is making sure that this is a safe website to use by moderating user activity as well as trying to identify and report potential predators who attempt to access the website. While most people use social networking websites with good intentions there are others who would cause harm, and web technology has not progressed to the extent that we can fully verify the identity of every user.
What we do
We have a range of processes in place that help us to quickly find and deal with predators, including reporting technology that means a user can let us know if they are suspicious of somebody at any point in their experience on The QYC using special report buttons. They can also contact our moderators on our forums and chat rooms, who are verified QYC staff. All QYC staff have been vetted and have passed an enhanced CRB check. This is a standard in the United Kingdom to allow our staff to work safely with minors.
What you can do
To help ensure that your child is safe on social networking websites in general, including The QYC, it is important that they understand they should not give out their personal information or meet people from the internet. At the same time it is also important that they know what to do if they feel unsafe or uncertain when they use a social networking website, for example that they should contact the people who run the website so that they can help, or that they contact the Police. You can help by having an open conversation with your child about how they use the internet.
You may also want to control the websites that they access, including The QYC. You can install parental control software on your computer to do this.
In the UK you or your child can report suspicious people who use any website to CEOP, the government agency set-up to protect children online. We have a strong history of working international agencies to identify issues and convict those who break the law and we are the only Gay Youth Site to be fully integrated with international child protection agencies. The history of our sites security has made other sites aware and even improved their security measures on their site we are a first.
Added Feb 2010
Revised Oct 2010