Preventing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) at parties: the Klarrro Pro Safe Place system
At night, in a bar, among strangers, safety is not optional: it is what makes meeting people possible. Your venue remains responsible for looking after its guests. To help you prevent sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) at parties and handle incidents, Klarrro gives your team a discreet alert channel, tools to act during the night and a record of what happened.
Safe Place at a glance
Safe Place is the alert button built into the app of your Klarrro parties. A participant who feels uncomfortable alerts your team from their phone, without crossing the room or speaking in front of the person bothering them. Your team assesses the situation and acts.
What Klarrro does
- Passes the participant’s alert on to your team, with the number of the badge involved if they give it.
- Freezes the conversation between the two badges at the moment of the alert, when one exists.
- Gives you the means to act: warn, ban, broadcast an instruction to the whole room.
- Keeps the email and phone number entered at sign-up for about 30 days after the party, available if law enforcement requests them.
What Klarrro does not do
- Klarrro does not call the police: your team decides what happens next.
- Klarrro does not step in inside your venue: warning or banning a participant remains your team’s decision. Only a banned-words filter, shared by all parties, applies automatically in the messaging.
- Klarrro replaces neither your security staff nor the “Ask for Angela” scheme.
What your participant sees
Participants join the party by scanning the party QR code or by entering its code, in the format ABC-123; the app then opens in the phone’s browser. It assigns them a badge number, in order of sign-up. Other participants identify them by this badge number, with no name displayed.
- A Safe Place banner, with an “Alert” button, stays accessible from the app’s screens. Safe Place also appears in the menu.
- The form has two fields, both optional: the number of the badge causing the problem and a description of the situation, up to 500 characters.
- The “Alert the team now” button sends the alert to your team. The app also reminds participants that they can speak directly to a member of the team.
- From a conversation, the participant can also report the exchange, with an optional reason.
The button is there whatever your plan (see pricing). It cannot be turned off.
To see how Safe Place is presented to participants, see the Safe Place page for participants.
What your team receives
The alert is sent to your team. Klarrro is not notified and does not handle it; its administrators can, however, view it for as long as it is kept. It appears in three places.
- The party control room, in your dashboard. Its “Reports” counter updates automatically every 15 seconds. It counts all the alerts and reports of the party, including those already handled.
- The Moderation screen, with its “Pending” and “Handled” tabs. Each card shows the type (Safe Place or Conversation), the badges involved, the time and the description.
- The team space, on the phones of the team members logged in to the party. The “Reports” tab lists the party’s alerts, with badge numbers, time and description.
From a card on the Moderation screen, you can display the conversation frozen at the time of the report, or the messages of the badge involved that are still available, generally up to 24 hours after its last exchange. The team space does not show conversations, but a team member can write from there to the badge that raised the alert to arrange a discreet meeting point; the person can reply.
Why an alert often has no conversation
A Safe Place alert often targets someone encountered in person, at the bar or on the dance floor, whom the person raising the alert never wrote to. This is normal, not a malfunction. When no badge is given, the card shows “No badge targeted — no linked conversation”. There is then no badge to sanction: your team goes to see the person who raised the alert.
When the person has exchanged messages with the badge involved, the conversation is frozen at the time of the alert. It stays attached to the report until about 7 days after the party’s last report, even after the messages are automatically deleted.
Taking action: warn, ban, evacuate
The app’s tools support your staff’s intervention; they do not replace it. The priority remains getting the person to safety, and evacuation remains your team’s decision.
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Warn | From your dashboard: a warning window appears on the participant’s screen, with a system message in their messaging and a notification if they have enabled them. From the team space: the warning arrives as a system message, and as a notification if they have enabled them. |
| Ban | The participant is logged out and their badge is blocked for 7 days. For 24 hours, their email and phone number can no longer be used to sign up again for the party. |
| Lift a ban | A Staff or Security team member cancels a ban issued by mistake, from the team space. Your dashboard does not offer this action. |
| Dismiss | The report moves to “Handled”, with no sanction. |
| Emergency | After confirmation, a preset message is sent to all registered participants: “EMERGENCY: Please head calmly to the exit and follow staff instructions.” |
| Message to all | A short message, written by your team, is displayed to all connected participants. It reaches them as a notification if they have enabled them. |
Finally, banned words, whose list Klarrro maintains, are masked automatically in the messaging; the recipient chooses whether or not to reveal them.
Who does what in your team
You invite your team members by email, party by party, each with a role. They then log in to the party’s team space on their phone. The number of team members depends on your plan.
| Role | What they see | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Organizer (your account) | The full dashboard: control room, Moderation screen, list of participants with email and phone number | Warn or ban the badge targeted by a report, dismiss a report, trigger the Emergency, broadcast a message |
| Staff | In the team space: the team, participants by badge number, their messages, the reports | Warn, ban, lift a ban, mark a report as handled |
| Security | The same screens as Staff | The same actions as Staff |
| Host | The same screens, plus the games | Run the games, mark a report as handled. The team space offers them no sanctions. |
To sanction a badge that no report targets (an alert with no badge given, a report made in person), go through a Staff or Security team member: from the team space, they can warn or ban any badge at the party.
Before opening: the safety checklist
- Appoint a safety lead for the party. If your plan includes team accounts, give them the Security role.
- Keep the control room open on a phone or tablet, behind the bar.
- Remind the team that a Safe Place alert is handled like a request for help in person: you go over, you listen, you get the person to safety.
- Introduce the Safe Place button at the start of the party, at the entrance or over the mic.
- Prepare your incident log, on paper or digital.
To prepare the rest of the party, see our guide to organizing a singles party in your bar.
In the field: Delirium Café, in Toulouse
At our first partner venue, 3 incidents were handled over 10 Klarrro parties. Read the Delirium Café case study.
Participants’ contact details: collection, consent, duration
- Collection. To get a badge, the participant gives their email and phone number, both mandatory, then ticks a box, also mandatory: “I accept the privacy policy and the processing of my data for this party”. These contact details are collected for the party and for safety.
- Confidentiality agreement, optional. You can require each participant to sign a confidentiality agreement, with their full name, before signing up.
- Display. Participants are identified by a badge number, with no name displayed.
- Access. You can find the email and phone number linked to each badge in the participant list of your dashboard.
- Duration. Every day, an automated task anonymizes the email and phone number recorded on badges registered more than 30 days ago, once the party is over. In the participant list, these contact details therefore remain available for about 30 days after the party.
- Participants’ rights. Each participant can download their data or delete their badge from the app menu. As long as a report targeting them is pending, deletion is refused; they will have to request it again. As soon as the report is marked “Handled”, they can delete their badge: record the incident in your log before marking it “Handled”.
Our terms of use designate you as the data controller for this data and Klarrro as the processor (Article 28 of the GDPR). They also commit you not to use it outside the context of the party. The details are in our privacy policy and our terms of use.
If the incident has legal consequences
Klarrro does not notify the police: your team decides. In case of immediate danger, call 17 (police) or 112 (European emergency number). A person who is deaf, hard of hearing or aphasic can reach 114, including by text message. These calls are free.
The contact details of the participant concerned are available if law enforcement requests them, for as long as they are still kept: each piece of data has its own retention period.
| Data | Duration |
|---|---|
| Messages exchanged in the app | Automatically deleted from the party, generally 24 hours after the last exchange (up to a few days after a message from the team or from a game). If a participant creates a Klarrro account, their exchanges with their matches are kept on that account. |
| Report and frozen conversation | About 7 days after the party’s last report |
| Block on a banned badge | 7 days |
| Block on the email and phone number of a banned badge | 24 hours |
| Email and phone number in the participant list | Anonymized about 30 days after the party |
| Party activity log | Up to 90 days after the last recorded action |
The right reflex: record the incident the same evening in your log (date, time, badge numbers, facts described, team actions and who took them). The report and the frozen conversation are deleted from Klarrro about 7 days after the party’s last report; your log, however, remains.
What is logged
- Party activity log. Warnings, bans, lifted bans and handled reports are recorded there with their author. Its latest entries appear in the control room, under “Recent activity”. It is kept for up to 90 days after the last recorded action, capped at 300 entries by default.
- Audit log, at Klarrro. Logins and sensitive actions by organizer accounts (warnings, bans, broadcast messages) are recorded there, for up to 90 days and within a cap on the number of entries. IP addresses are partially masked.
Safe Place, Ask for Angela and SGBV protocols
Ask for Angela: principle and joining
In May 2020, the French government announced the Angela plan against street harassment, which develops the “Ask for Angela” scheme and a network of safe venues: a person being harassed in public can walk into a partner bar and ask “Where is Angela?”. The venue gets them to safety in a secluded spot and can call a taxi or the police (press release of 28 May 2020, in French).
The official FAQ (in French) spells it out: partners in no way replace the police or healthcare professionals, and a person who says they are in difficulty without saying the word “Angela” must also be helped.
Safe Place extends this gesture into the phone, without the person having to go all the way to the bar. Klarrro is not part of the official scheme. To join it, ask your town hall: the terms, such as the charter or team awareness training, vary from one city to another.
SGBV protocols and training
The Centre national de la musique (CNM) published a protocol for preventing sexual and gender-based violence for the music industry in December 2020 and announced that its funding would depend on compliance with it from January 2021 (CNM protocol, in French).
The Consentis association, founded in 2018, offers training to nightlife professionals and helps them design charters and protocols; it encourages them to include a component dedicated to safety and listening in their programming. According to the exploratory survey carried out when it was founded, 57% of the women surveyed said they felt unsafe going out alone to parties, compared with 10% of men (City of Paris, in French).
Safe Place does not replace your SGBV protocol. It gives it an alert channel, a record and the means to act during the party.
Technical security and hosting
Encrypted connections (HTTPS), passwords hashed with bcrypt, hosting in the European Union (OVH), self-hosted, cookie-free Umami audience measurement.
For bar chains
With the chain licence, each bar has its own account and keeps control of the moderation of its parties. The head-office dashboard shows the list of your bars and counters aggregated across the network, never a participant’s email or phone number. Discover the chain licence.
Frequently asked questions
Who receives the Safe Place alert?
Your team. Klarrro is not notified and does not handle the alert; its administrators can, however, view it for as long as it is kept. The alert appears in the control room and the Moderation screen of your dashboard, and in the “Reports” tab of the team space.
Does Klarrro notify the police?
No. Your team decides what happens next. In case of immediate danger, call 17 or 112. The contact details of the participant concerned are available if law enforcement requests them.
Can the conversation in question be read back?
Yes, if the person raising the alert exchanged messages with the badge involved: the conversation is frozen at the time of the alert and kept until about 7 days after the party’s last report. Often, the alert targets a badge encountered in person, and there is no conversation.
How long is data kept?
Messages: automatically deleted from the party, generally 24 hours after the last exchange; if a participant creates a Klarrro account, their exchanges with their matches are kept on that account. Reports: about 7 days after the party’s last report. Email and phone number in the participant list: anonymized about 30 days after the party. Activity log: up to 90 days.
What happens when a badge is banned?
The participant is logged out and their badge is blocked for 7 days. For 24 hours, their email and phone number can no longer be used to sign up again for the party.
Does Klarrro replace Ask for Angela or a security guard?
No. Safe Place is one more discreet channel to your team. It complements your human setup and initiatives such as “Ask for Angela”.
Is Safe Place included in all plans?
Yes. The Safe Place button is present in every participant’s app, whatever your plan. It cannot be turned off.
Equip your venue with Safe Place
Want to see an alert’s journey, from the participant’s button to the Moderation screen? Book a demo. For a question about your participants’ data, write to us.