Reporting Personal Experiences Confidentially

The following is provided by Suzanne Newcombe, Research Officer at Inform.

It is posted here with kind permission.

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People with personal experience that they wish to report anonymously on any religious movement such as Rigpa can provide their stories in confidence to Inform, wherever they are located within the world. This may be useful considering the multi-national nature of many contemporary religious movements and the fact that we provide information to a variety of enquirers, including governmental organisations, and concerned individuals.

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All enquiries to Inform are kept strictly confidential. There is a statement of our policy on confidentiality here: http://www.inform.ac/node/4. We use the information given to us by enquirers to make statements about general trends in concerns about a specific group and contextualise this information based on the nature of the questions we are asked.

So for example, if someone asked about information about a particular group, we might include the information that: ‘Inform has received some reports from former members that they experienced pressure to attend expensive retreats.’ For this example, we may also contextualise this information with the actual price of the retreats in question and a comparison with similar groups’ retreat prices.

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Although our primary working language is English, we have staff members fluent in Dutch, French and German, so we can accept testimonies in these languages as well. If you have any concerns about how your information may be used, please feel free to clarify and discuss these before deciding what you would like to report. You can also request information about a religious movement to better understand the type of information we provide.

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You could email at: inform@lse.ac.uk, use the contact form here: http://www.inform.ac/contact or telephone us on: +44 (0)20 7955 7654  (Monday - Friday 10am-4.30pm GMT)