Data Protection & GDPR

Rape Crisis Midwest (RCM) is  committed to keeping your data safe. 

RCM 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 if 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 Rape Crisis Midwest’s Data Collection Officer Siobhán O Leary – 1800311511 – [email protected] 

We collect and use two types of personal data from you: Administrative data and 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.

2. Statistical data:

We collect data from you, with your consent, about you and your experience of sexual violence. We hold and manage this database managed by our partners at Rape Crisis Ireland (RCI).

We will make sure that the data that we collect, hold, analyse and share through the RCI data system is safe, secure and does not 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 https://www.rapecrisisireland.ie/research/statistics-archive/ 

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 happen, 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 RCI shares 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.

RCM or RCI 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.