How supervision works
Plainly, for young people, parents, and mentors alike.
Mentors are checked before anyone can find them
Every mentor completes a government-ID check and a liveness check, so the person on the account is the person on the document. We also run a sex-offender registry screen. A mentor profile is not searchable until all three come back clear, and the safety team records who made that call.
Young people choose; adults cannot
There is no directory of children on SherpaCentral. An adult cannot search for a young person, browse a list of them, or send a first message. Every relationship starts with the young person asking, and the mentor can only accept or decline.
Conversations are supervised, and we say so
Messages are private from the public and from other users. They are not private from our safety system or from authorized moderators. Everything is kept — there are no disappearing messages, and neither side can delete what they sent. We tell young people this before their first message, in the conversation itself, rather than burying it in a policy.
What the safety system watches for
Every message in an adult–minor conversation is scanned for the patterns that precede harm: asking a child to keep secrets, moving to another app, requesting photos, sexual or romantic content, offers of money or gifts, pressure and guilt, undermining the child’s parents, requests for address, school, or schedule, and proposals to meet in person. Slow patterns count too — a run of smaller flags raises a signal on its own.
What parents see
Guardians always see who their child talks to, when conversations happen, mentor profiles, and every safety event. For children under 16, guardians also approve each mentor before the conversation opens and can read the full history. For 16- and 17-year-olds, guardians see the same activity and alerts but not the message text — the safety team still reads everything and contacts the guardian when something is wrong. A guardian can pause any mentorship at any time, in any age band.
What moderators can do
Safety staff can read a complete history, join or pause a conversation, restrict or suspend an account, contact a guardian, and permanently remove an adult. A ban ends every relationship that adult had, not just the reported one. Actions against a young person’s account are deliberately limited: a child in a grooming pattern is the victim, and support routes through their guardian.
Moderators are watched too
Every time a staff member reads a child’s conversation, the access is logged with their name and the time, and the guardian is notified that a review happened. Staff access to a child’s messages is an event, not a background privilege.
What we keep off a child’s profile
A young person’s public profile carries a display name, a region no more precise than a state or country, and their interests. Precise location, school, address, phone number, and personal email are never displayed, and the safety system flags attempts by either side to exchange them.