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7 Cups Teen Safety

Last updated: March 1, 2024

Welcome to 7 Cups!

7 Cups offers anonymous emotional support to anyone aged 13 and up through a volunteer base of active listeners, community resources, and self help. 7 Cups has specialized supports for its teen user base of 13-17 year olds.

We take the safety of our teen population very seriously with a series of processes and protocols in place to support this mission and differentially handle topics including general safety, reporting of sexual abuse, crisis, and crime reporting.

Teen listeners are subject to additional checks including extra training and mock chats. These additional checks will vary and change over time as different methods are tested.

Our support spans

  • product functionality to support safety and well-being
  • specific referrals for professional support when active listening is not sufficient, and
  • in-depth training of listeners to help users manage related emotions.

In product support

7 Cups helps individuals in situations where people need to talk about a genuine problem and manage related emotions.

Emergency contact information

We encourage all teen members and listeners to upload parent or guardian emergency contact information. This will be stored securely and only accessible to the admin team if there is a crisis situation or additional support is required.

Offensive content

In instances where issues reported are inappropriate or offensive, 7 Cups has blocking capabilities to block the offender and end the chat immediately

Abuse

Sometimes a person needs more help than just listening. In these cases, we refer them to appropriate resources externally.

  • You feel like the person needs more specialist help than you are able to offer as a listener.
  • The person is seeking professional advice.
  • The person is in a significant amount of emotional distress.
  • A listener has spoken with a person several times and there is no change or improvement.

Referral

When child abuse, sexual assault, minor abuse is brought up - If the member/ help seeker reports they are a harm to themselves or others, the listener is trained to refer to crisis resources (or any other relevant/ related resources) and professionally end the chat.

General crisis referral resources

  • RAINN
  • National Suicide Prevention Line

Partner-recommended resources

Our formal partner organizations have custom referral resources to county mental health services and other specialized services for screening, assessment, referral and crisis counseling by phone.

Training resources

  • Serious issues and referrals
  • Your Safety & Well Being
  • Inappropriate Chats