Your name, age and your life story is personal to you. It’s your data. You have rights over your data.

We are committed to keeping your data 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.

For more information and to access these rights contact the RCNI’s Data Compliance Officer

Cliona Saidlear  on cliona@rcni.ie or phone 018656955

Your local RCNI Rape Crisis Centre will have their own Data Compliance Officer. Please see their notice board or contact your centre and ask for their Data Compliance Officer.

In Rape Crisis we collect and use two types of personal data from you:

1. Administrative data
2. Statistical data

1. Administrative data:

we collect minimal data to deliver our services to you, such as your contact details so we can arrange appointments and your service history. We promise you that we will:

• 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 someone else. [1]

2. Statistical data:

We collect data from you, with your consent, about you and your experience of sexual violence. We hold and manage this data in the RCNI database.

We will make sure that the data that we collect, hold, analyse and share through the RCNI data system 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. Follow this link to see an example of a published report from such data RCNI Rape Crisis Statistics and Annual Report 2015

Measures to protect your information

• Your name is not used in the data system.
• We have technological security around the online database to stop a hack or break in.
• The information is encrypted so that if a break in does happens all the data is jumbled up and meaningless.
• We limit access to the data system by role and purpose.

We talk about and share information from your data in line with strict rules

• We will make the general analysis available. We will not share your data on its own.
• When talking about the data we group potentially revealing data in bigger groups of data to protect you. For example we won’t say ‘there are 2 people from Lithuania’ instead we will say ‘there are 40 people from Eastern European countries’.
• If RCNI share data for research purposes (for example 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.
• The Centre or RCNI share some information from the data with agencies, such as funders or state agencies. We only share groups of data to protect your confidentiality. For example, 10% of all clients were aged between 20 and 25.

[1] These laws include 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).

Please find a PDF download of this text, and a shorter ‘Your data, Your Rights’ poster here:

Your Data, Your Rights Long Text PDF
Your Data, Your Rights Short Text PDF