Privacy and dignity of the children

Helping without receiving anything back

We support the children in growing into independent adults within their own lives, culture, country, and social surroundings. They should be freer to decide what they make of their lives. For that they need a safe home, education, and health. They do not need a relationship with us, or with the people who give.

A donation with us is a one-sided gift. Altruism, for us, means helping without asking a child for a photo, a thank-you, a message, or a relationship. The children owe our donors nothing. We do not draw them into that layer of the project.

Our measure is as much effect as possible, and as little burden on the children as necessary. The association’s money, attention, and rules should not create dependency, a duty of gratitude, or the feeling of being in debt. The children build their own future. We support them where circumstances put that path at risk.

Why we do not use suffering to raise funds

Showing children’s suffering has long been more than reporting in the charity sector. Research on fundraising communication keeps finding that images and stories of people in distress prompt donations, because they appeal to a sense of responsibility. That dynamic is widely used.

In our view, depicting suffering or difficult situations must never be the lever that brings in more money. A hard situation may inform. It must not turn one child into material, or display that child’s distress so that others will give.

We therefore do not tell stories that expose a child. Illness, school, and family history stay private. What we show is the work at the home, the projects, and the adults who have agreed to be published.

Why we also do not publish friendly pictures of children

Many organizations are rethinking how they use media. Text, image, video, and sound can now be processed in ways that mean a published file is no longer finished. Unknown parties can collect material from the internet systematically. From the outside, it is not possible to judge reliably what it will be used for.

Generative AI and other ways of editing image and sound let people without technical training alter material and publish it again. From single pictures, content can be made that is hard to tell from a real recording, including deepfakes and depictions that violate the dignity and safety of the person shown. This is not a distant risk. It is why charitable organizations have to reconsider every depiction of children and young people once features of identity are recognizable. That applies to images of suffering, and equally to everyday life, play, and school.

Pictures and other media that show people require the informed consent of the person shown, or of their legal representative. We, and the people we inform before they consent, often cannot yet name the full risks of a technology that changes quickly. Future risks cannot be explained well enough. Adult consent is therefore not enough for us to depict a child.

We do not pressure children to be photographed. A child’s perspective matters. Consent from an adult alone is not, for us, a reason to show them. Publishing no recognizable faces is our own, deliberately stricter rule. Not every guideline requires that without exception. We choose it.

On this website we do not publish images or other content in which a child’s or young person’s face is clearly recognizable. The same applies to physical features that identify a person beyond doubt, and to names or stories that do the same.

Contact with children

Many organizations use sponsorships or regular gifts to support individual children. Often only one side decides: the donor chooses a sponsorship, and the child never hears of that gift. Some people find it sad that there is no exchange with one particular child. We want to explain why we do not offer sponsorships that pass on information about individual children, such as sponsor updates, photos, or glimpses of daily life.

We do not arrange contact between donors and children. That will not change. Giving a child the task of building or keeping a relationship with a donor is incompatible with the child’s welfare. We know many of our regular donors. We cannot, in every case, verify who is behind a gift. And a child must never feel obliged to allow contact, or to keep it up, so that someone will continue to give.

The same line applies to gifts for one particular child, and to sponsors as attachment figures. A donation stays an act with nothing asked in return. It covers real costs: if a gift meets one child’s needs for a day, those needs for that day are met. It is simply not attached to a named child.

Equal treatment in the home

The children live together. They should make friends and have experiences without competition, and without the feeling of being compared or passed over. Our support must therefore not decide which child receives which help in a time of need.

Imagine you live in a home. Another child receives a Christmas present every year, and a bicycle for their birthday, from a sponsorship. You do not. A gift like that creates comparison and exclusion, even when it is well meant. Information about individual children can do the same: someone with a special link to the outside stands differently in the house from the others.

We want every child and young person in the project to grow up with the same standing, and to experience solidarity as something ordinary. We keep working on that. The effect of a donation falls on the whole home, not on one child.

Responsibility with the orphanage leadership

What we publish is decided with the orphanage leadership in Kon Tum. The people on site know the children and the situation. Responsibility for protection does not pass to them. LittleBigDreams remains responsible for risks that arise from our website, our letters, our partners, and our public communication.

The same rule applies to the press, appeal letters, and partnerships. Before anything is published that concerns the children, we agree it together. We do not pass on material in which children’s faces are visible.

The foundations we act on

The documents below have not reviewed or approved our position. They are published standards we orient ourselves by. Law and the guidelines of large organizations differ. Where we are stricter, that is our decision as an association.

• UNICEF: Ethical Reporting Guidelines Privacy, dignity, names, consent, and protection from making a child identifiable and exposed through an image or a description.
• Save the Children Germany: guide to photos and videos of children Why everyday pictures, too, can be taken out of context or misused online.
• World Vision Germany: Safeguarding Dignified depiction, informed consent, and rules that also apply to the press and to partners.
• Keeping Children Safe: International Child Safeguarding Standards An organization’s responsibility for risks created by its own work and by its partners.
• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 3 and 16 The best interests of the child come first. Privacy, honour, and reputation are protections in their own right, not only after abuse has occurred.

Publishing portraits in Germany is also governed by section 22 and section 23 of the Art Copyright Act: taking a picture and showing it on an open website are not the same thing. Names, identifying stories, and images can at the same time be personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation. Because the home is in Kon Tum, the law there applies alongside German and European law. We do not put any single statute in place of our own, stricter rule.

Questions

Short answers on donations, getting involved, and protecting the children are on the Q&A page.

If a picture should be taken down, write to hello@littlebigdreams.org.