Child Protection and Under-18 Safeguarding

AIC publishes research by people as young as thirteen. That is a deliberate choice, made because a fifteen-year-old in Kingston or Castries who has built something real deserves a venue that takes it seriously. It also means the journal holds personal data about children and corresponds with them about their work, and that carries obligations we would rather state publicly than keep in an internal handbook.

1. Who This Covers

This policy applies to every person under 18 who interacts with the journal in any capacity, and to every editor, moderator, reviewer, mentor and volunteer who might encounter them. In practice that means four groups:

• Student authors aged 13 to 17 submitting through the student researcher section
• Under-18 co-authors on any submission, including a manuscript or preprint whose lead author is an adult
• Under-18 members of the student reader panel, who read student submissions alongside the working researchers
• Under-18 contributor account holders registered through the registration form

The journal's absolute minimum age is 13. We do not register, correspond with, or hold data on anyone younger. If a child under 13 has research they want read, a teacher or guardian may write to us on their behalf and a person will answer, but the child does not hold an account and the adult remains the author of record.

2. The Named Adult

Every under-18 participant has exactly one named adult on the record. This is the person the journal deals with.

Who can be the named adult

• A parent
• A legal guardian
• A teacher, head of department or school-appointed project supervisor
• A recognised youth programme or research mentorship coordinator

The named adult may be the same person as the mentor who countersigns the research, and in school projects usually is. Where they are different people, we hold both, and we write to both.

What we collect about them

We collect nothing else about the named adult. No address, no employer, no identity document, no proof of guardianship. Asking a parent in a Caribbean secondary school to produce documentary proof of guardianship would exclude precisely the students this section exists to reach, and it would not make any child safer.

How consent is verified

Withdrawing consent

The named adult, or the young person themselves, may withdraw at any time by writing to students@caribbeanaijournal.org. No reason is required and none is asked for. Before publication, withdrawal stops everything and the record is deleted. After publication, the article stays in the scholarly record, but we will replace the name with initials and country on request, immediately and without explanation.

3. How We Communicate With Under-18s

This section binds every editor, moderator, reviewer and volunteer, and breaching it ends an appointment.

• All correspondence goes to the named adult, with the young person copied. Never the reverse, and never the young person alone.
• No private channels. No editor, reviewer or volunteer may contact an under-18 author through personal email, a phone number, direct messages, a messaging app, or any social platform. There is one channel, it is the journal's mailbox, and it is monitored.
• No unmonitored one-to-one meetings. Where a call is genuinely useful, for example to talk through a revision, the named adult or mentor is present. There are no exceptions to this, including for the Editor-in-Chief.
• No requests for additional personal information. An editor asking a student for a photograph, a home address, a date of birth, a social media handle or a personal phone number is acting outside this policy, and the student or adult should report it at once.
• Feedback is about the work. Reviewer comments on a student paper address the research and nothing else, and the student section editor reads every report before it is sent on. Reports that are demeaning rather than critical are returned to the reviewer to rewrite.
• Nothing is asked for in exchange for publication. Not money, not data, not a favour, not an introduction. Publication at AIC is free and always will be.

4. Data We Hold About Under-18s

Data minimisation is applied harder to young people than to anyone else on the site.

Age is collected as a number because the safeguarding rule turns on whether it is under 18. A date of birth would give us a more precise fact we have no use for, and a more damaging one to lose.

Retention

• Unsuccessful student submissions: 12 months, half the 24 months that applies to adult submissions.
• Named adult and mentor contact details: until the student turns 18, or 12 months after the submission closes, whichever comes first. They exist for consent verification and nothing else.
• Published student papers: permanent, as part of the scholarly record, subject to the initials right below.
• Everything else follows the retention schedule.

5. What Gets Published

A published paper follows its author for life, and a decision made at fifteen should not be irreversible at twenty-five.

• We publish, at most: the student's name, their school or institution, and their country.
• We never publish: a photograph, an age, a date of birth, an email address, a phone number, a home address, or anything else identifying.
• Initials on request, at any time. A student may choose at submission to appear as initials and country only, and the form carries a tick box for it.
• The right to change your mind at 18. Anyone who was under 18 when their work was published may, at any point after turning 18, ask us to replace their name with initials. We do it, we do not ask why, and we do not publish a correction notice drawing attention to the change.
• Named adults and mentors are credited only where they asked to be, and never as authors unless they did the research.

6. Obligations on Editors, Reviewers and Volunteers

Anyone handling student submissions accepts the following as a condition of appointment. The obligations are listed in the section head terms of reference and confirmed by tick box on the application form.

1. Read this policy before your first student manuscript. The student section editor confirms you have.
2. Complete the safeguarding briefing. Thirty minutes, online, repeated every two years. Required for the student section editor and every reviewer on the student panel.
3. Use the journal's channels only. Every message to or about a young person goes through the journal mailbox and is retained there.
4. Never handle a student submission where you have an outside relationship with the student, including teaching them, coaching them, or being related to them. Declare it and recuse yourself.
5. Report a concern immediately. The route is in section 7, and it is a duty rather than a discretion.
6. Never put a student manuscript into a third-party AI system that retains or trains on inputs. This is a hard prohibition for all manuscripts and applies with particular force here.

The journal holds no unsupervised physical contact with young people and runs no in-person events for them. If that changes, this policy is revised first, including a criminal records check requirement appropriate to the jurisdiction, and not afterwards.

7. Raising a Concern

If anything about how the journal has treated a young person worries you, tell us. This applies to students, parents, guardians, teachers, mentors, editors, reviewers and bystanders equally.

We do not require you to be certain before you report. A concern that turns out to be nothing costs an hour; a concern that goes unreported costs considerably more. Nobody has ever been penalised here for raising one in good faith, and nobody will be.

What we do with a report

1. Acknowledge within one business day.
2. Stand the person down from all work involving young people while the matter is examined. This is neutral, not a finding.
3. Establish the facts, led by the Editor-in-Chief or, where they are the subject, by the Council.
4. Act. Outcomes run from a clarification, through a written warning and mandatory retraining, to immediate removal from the board and a report to the relevant authority.
5. Tell the person who reported what the outcome was, so far as confidentiality allows.
6. Record and learn. Every report is logged with its outcome, and the log is reviewed by the board annually.

8. Research Involving Other Young People

A student author may also be a researcher whose participants are children, and the obligation runs the other way too. Where a submission involves data collected from people under 18, whether by a student or an adult author, the research ethics policy applies in full: documented consent from participants' guardians, assent from the young participants themselves, ethical approval where the institution requires it, and no identifying data in the published paper. The student section editor checks this before review begins, and a submission that cannot show it does not go forward. Students are told what is missing and how to fix it, rather than simply refused.

9. Review of This Policy

Reviewed annually by the editorial board, and immediately after any safeguarding report, whatever its outcome. Changes are published here and recorded in the document register.