ARCH-003 — VERSION 1.0 | RESEARCH ETHICS STATEMENT™
SAFECHAIN™ | ARCHITECTURE GOVERNANCE SERIES | ARCH™
ARCH-003 — VERSION 1.0 | RESEARCH ETHICS STATEMENT™
SAFECHAIN™ RESEARCH
ETHICS STATEMENT™
Research Integrity, Safeguarding Ethics, Survivor-Informed Principles, and Publication Standards
Document Reference: ARCH-003
Series: SAFECHAIN™ Architecture Governance Series (ARCH™)
Series Position: Research Ethics — Constitutional Standard for All SAFECHAIN™ Research and Publication Activity
Author: Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Status: Published — First Edition
Version: 1.0
Date: June 2026
Classification: Public — Full Distribution
Authority: This Statement is constitutionally binding on all SAFECHAIN™ research, publication, and engagement activity. Compliance is non-negotiable.
Related Documents: ARCH-001 (Publication Architecture); ARCH-002 (Standards Map); REPORT-001 (Annual Report Framework); NVI-002 (Consent Architecture)
Publisher: SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
Contact: samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
Preamble: Why Research Ethics Matters for SAFECHAIN™
SAFECHAIN™ is an organisation that holds other institutions accountable for their governance standards. The research ethics obligations defined in this Statement are the mechanism through which SAFECHAIN™ holds itself to the same standard. An organisation that publishes standards for institutional governance integrity must itself operate with research integrity — because the authority of governance standards derives, in significant part, from the credibility of the organisation that defines them.
SAFECHAIN™'s research programme draws on a body of evidence produced by and about survivors of domestic abuse, economic abuse, and institutional failure. The ethical obligations that arise from this relationship — to the people whose experiences constitute the evidence base, to the practitioners whose professional work is analysed and assessed, and to the public whose confidence in the SAFECHAIN™ framework depends on it being produced honestly — are not peripheral to the research programme. They are its governing condition.
This Statement defines the ethical standards that every SAFECHAIN™ research output, publication, and public engagement activity must meet. It is constitutionally binding — not advisory, not aspirational, but obligatory. The Author is the first person accountable for compliance with every provision in this Statement.
1. Research Integrity Principles
1.1 Honesty
Every SAFECHAIN™ research and publication output must be honest — in its representation of the evidence, in its characterisation of the SAFECHAIN™ framework's own limitations, and in its acknowledgement of uncertainty where uncertainty exists. Honesty requires that where the evidence is mixed, it is presented as mixed; where the evidence does not yet exist, the claim is not made as if it did; and where the analysis has been revised in response to new evidence or feedback, the revision is documented.
The most demanding expression of this principle is the prohibition on confirmation bias in the SAFECHAIN™ research programme. The External Evidence Response Series™ (EERS™) is designed to engage with the evidence as it exists — including evidence that challenges SAFECHAIN™ positions, identifies limitations in the constitutional architecture, or documents governance approaches that differ from SAFECHAIN™'s. An EERS™ paper that engages only with evidence that supports the SAFECHAIN™ framework has failed the honesty standard. The quality of the research programme depends on its willingness to engage with evidence that is uncomfortable.
1.2 Rigour
Every SAFECHAIN™ publication that makes evidence-based claims must meet a defined rigour standard. Empirical claims — claims about what the evidence shows — must be traceable to a specific, verifiable source. Analytical claims — claims about what the evidence means — must be derived from the cited evidence through a reasoning process that is transparent and challengeable. Governance claims — claims about what institutions should do — must be grounded in both the empirical evidence of current failure and the analytical framework that makes the alternative coherent.
Rigour also requires that SAFECHAIN™ publications distinguish clearly between what is known, what is inferred, and what is argued. The use of hedging language — 'the evidence suggests', 'this analysis indicates', 'we argue that' — is not weakness. It is the intellectual honesty that distinguishes research from advocacy and analysis from assertion.
1.3 Transparency
SAFECHAIN™ research and publications must be transparent about: the sources used and how they were selected; the analytical methodology applied; the limitations of the analysis, including the data that does not exist and the questions the analysis cannot answer; the intellectual influences and frameworks that shape the analysis; and any relationships — institutional, financial, or personal — that might affect the objectivity of the output. Transparency does not require the disclosure of commercially sensitive information or the identification of individuals whose confidentiality has been protected. It requires that the reader can understand how the output was produced and can assess its quality independently.
1.4 Accountability for Error
SAFECHAIN™ publications that are found to contain errors — factual errors, methodological errors, or analytical errors — will be corrected promptly, publicly, and without defensive framing. Corrections are published in two forms: a correction notice attached to the original publication identifying the specific error and its correction; and a Register Note in the SAFECHAIN™ Master Publication Register™ documenting the correction event. Where an error is material — where it affects the central argument of the publication or has been cited by others in a way that perpetuates the error — the correction will be promoted as actively as the original publication.
2. Safeguarding Ethics
2.1 The Primacy of Survivor Safety
SAFECHAIN™ research and publication activity takes place in a context in which the subject matter — domestic abuse, economic abuse, institutional failure, and vulnerability — directly affects the safety of real, identified people. The primary ethical obligation arising from this context is that no SAFECHAIN™ research or publication activity will, directly or indirectly, increase the risk to any survivor of domestic abuse or economic abuse.
This obligation has specific operational implications. SAFECHAIN™ will not publish analysis that could be used to identify the location, legal proceedings, or personal circumstances of any survivor of domestic abuse. It will not publish analysis that names or sufficiently describes any individual practitioner, institution, or case in a way that could be used to identify a victim without their express, informed, and uncoerced consent. And it will not engage in research methodologies — including the solicitation of survivor testimony, the analysis of case file data, or the use of lived experience in public engagement — without the safeguarding governance that the NVI-002 consent architecture and the ARCH-003 survivor-informed principles require.
2.2 Institutional Accountability Without Identification
SAFECHAIN™ research frequently analyses institutional governance failures — the conditions, decisions, and omissions that have produced preventable harm. This analysis must be conducted at the institutional and systemic level rather than at the individual practitioner level, except where public accountability processes — serious case reviews, domestic homicide reviews, public inquiries, or court proceedings — have already placed individual conduct in the public domain.
The distinction between institutional accountability and individual blame is not a courtesy to practitioners whose conduct contributed to harm. It is the analytical position that the evidence most strongly supports: that safeguarding failures are primarily systemic rather than individual in origin, and that analysis that attributes failure to individuals without addressing the systemic conditions that made the failure likely is not only analytically insufficient but actively harmful — because it displaces attention from the structural changes that would prevent repetition.
2.3 Engagement with Active Cases
SAFECHAIN™ research and publication activity will not engage with the specific facts, parties, or proceedings of any active legal case, active regulatory investigation, or active serious case review process. Where SAFECHAIN™ analysis refers to active cases for illustrative or evidential purposes, the reference will be at the level of publicly available information only, with no analysis that could be construed as a contribution to the proceedings. This standard applies regardless of whether any party to an active case has requested SAFECHAIN™ engagement with their specific circumstances.
3. Survivor-Informed Principles
3.1 What Survivor-Informed Means
Survivor-informed research and publication is research and publication that is shaped by the authentic knowledge, experience, and perspectives of survivors of domestic abuse and economic abuse — not as objects of study, not as testimony in support of pre-formed conclusions, but as primary holders of knowledge that no researcher who has not experienced the system from the inside can independently produce.
The SAFECHAIN™ research programme is survivor-informed in four specific senses. The problem definition — the identification of what the safeguarding system fails to provide — is grounded in survivor testimony and survivor-led research as the primary evidential basis. The framework evaluation — the assessment of whether the SAFECHAIN™ constitutional architecture addresses the failures that survivors identify — is conducted with survivor input rather than solely by the researcher who designed the architecture. The language — the specific words used to describe vulnerability, abuse, institutional failure, and governance — reflects the language that survivors use and find accurate rather than the professional or regulatory vocabulary that institutions use. And the impact assessment — the evaluation of whether the SAFECHAIN™ framework is producing the improvements it claims — includes survivor experience as a primary outcome measure.
3.2 Consent Standards for Survivor Engagement
Any SAFECHAIN™ research or publication activity that draws on the testimony, accounts, or experiences of survivors of domestic abuse or economic abuse must meet the following consent standards, which are higher than the standards the UK GDPR requires and reflect the specific vulnerability context of the research population.
Informed consent requires that the survivor has been given a complete and accurate description of how their contribution will be used — including the specific publications in which it may appear, the level of anonymisation that will be applied, the duration for which it will be retained, and their right to withdraw at any time before publication without consequence. Informed consent for research purposes is not the same as NVI-002 consent for safeguarding intelligence exchange — the research consent standard is defined here and applies independently of the NVI-002 architecture.
Capacity assessment requires that the researcher has assessed — through direct, unhurried conversation — whether the individual is in a position to give genuine, uncoerced consent at the time of engagement. A survivor who is in an active crisis period, in an active legal proceeding that might be affected by public testimony, or in a relationship with SAFECHAIN™ as a service user (rather than a research participant) is not in a position to give consent that the research programme can use.
Withdrawal rights must be actively communicated — not included in a consent form that the individual may not have read — and the withdrawal mechanism must be simple, direct, and consequence-free. A survivor who withdraws consent after contributing to a SAFECHAIN™ publication is entitled to have her contribution removed from any future use of that publication, and to a written confirmation that the withdrawal has been processed.
3.3 Survivor Voice in Publication
Where SAFECHAIN™ publications include the direct voice of survivors — whether in quotation, paraphrase, or summary — three additional standards apply. Attribution must be anonymised unless the survivor has given specific, written consent to be identified by name in the publication. Editorial intervention in survivor testimony must be minimal — sufficient to ensure grammatical coherence and to remove identifying details, but not sufficient to reframe, reinterpret, or strengthen the testimony beyond what the survivor actually expressed. And the survivor must have the right to review the use of their testimony in context before publication — not to veto the analysis that surrounds it, but to confirm that their words have been used accurately and in a context they recognise as honest.
3.4 Lived Experience in Governance
The SAFECHAIN™ framework's governance architecture — specifically the NOM-007 Public Trust and Legitimacy Framework™ and the Lived Experience Advisory Panel — creates a structural role for survivor voice in governance that is distinct from research participation. In the governance context, survivors are not research subjects — they are governance participants whose assessment of the SAFECHAIN™ framework's direction and impact is a constitutional governance input, not a research data point. The ethics of this engagement are governed by NOM-007 rather than by this Research Ethics Statement, but the underlying principles — informed engagement, genuine agency, freedom from coercion, and the right to withdraw — are identical.
4. Publication Standards
4.1 The SAFECHAIN™ Publication Ethics Standard
Every SAFECHAIN™ publication must meet eight publication ethics standards before it is released. Originality: the intellectual content is original to the SAFECHAIN™ research programme and does not reproduce, without appropriate citation, the intellectual work of others. Evidence basis: every empirical claim is supported by a cited, verifiable source. Transparency of method: the analytical methodology used to derive conclusions from evidence is described with sufficient clarity to enable independent assessment. Limitation acknowledgement: the publication acknowledges the specific limitations of its analysis — the evidence it cannot access, the questions it cannot answer, the assumptions it makes. Honest titling: the title and abstract accurately represent the content; the publication does not claim more than it delivers. Survivor ethics compliance: any use of survivor testimony, experience, or data complies with the consent and representation standards defined in Section 3. Independence of conclusion: the conclusions are derived from the evidence and analysis rather than from the institutional, political, or reputational preferences of any party. Correctability: the publication is designed to be corrected — it identifies specific, falsifiable claims that would require revision if the identified evidence were shown to be inaccurate.
4.2 Citation Ethics
SAFECHAIN™ publications cite sources for two purposes: to ground empirical claims in the evidence base, and to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of others whose work has shaped the SAFECHAIN™ analysis. Both purposes carry ethical obligations. Empirical citations must be accurate — the cited source must actually say what the citation attributes to it, and the citation must not be taken out of context in a way that misrepresents the source's overall argument. Intellectual citations must be complete — where the SAFECHAIN™ analysis builds substantially on the work of another researcher, scholar, or practitioner, that contribution is acknowledged in a way that the contributor would recognise as accurate.
SAFECHAIN™ will not cite sources it has not read. It will not cite sources selectively to support a predetermined conclusion while omitting sources that challenge it. And it will not cite government reports, regulatory findings, or serious case reviews in ways that attribute to them positions they do not take or that treat their findings as more definitive than they are.
4.3 Peer Review and Independent Validation
SAFECHAIN™ publications targeted at academic audiences — papers submitted to Feminist Legal Studies, the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, or other peer-reviewed journals — are subject to the peer review standards of those journals. SAFECHAIN™ welcomes peer review as an intellectual strengthening process, not a compliance obligation, and will engage honestly with peer reviewer feedback including feedback that requires substantial revision of submitted work.
SAFECHAIN™ publications in the institutional series — the NOM™, NVI™, SIS™, and other constitutional series — are not peer-reviewed in the academic sense. They are subject instead to the governance review process defined in ARCH-001 and to the independent verification requirement of REPORT-001 Section 1.3. The standard is not academic peer review but governance scrutiny — the assessment of whether the publication's claims are grounded in the evidence and the architecture it draws on, by someone with the independence and expertise to identify where they are not.
4.4 Conflict of Interest Declaration
Every SAFECHAIN™ publication includes, in its metadata, a conflict of interest statement. For the current publication programme, the relevant declarations are: the Author (Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA) is the founder and Chief Executive of SAFECHAINN Ltd, the publisher of the publication; the Author is an ORCID-registered independent researcher conducting research that informs the publication programme; and the Author is a litigant in person in legal proceedings (ZZ22D09896) that are entirely separate from the SAFECHAIN™ institutional and publication programme and that must not be referenced in any SAFECHAIN™ publication. Where institutional partnerships are developed that create financial relationships with SAFECHAIN™, those relationships will be declared in affected publications. The declaration standard is proactive, not reactive — relationships are declared before they become relevant to a publication, not after.
5. Ethical Governance of the Research Programme
5.1 The Author's Personal Accountability
Every provision of this Research Ethics Statement is the personal accountability of Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA as the author and director of the SAFECHAIN™ research programme. There is no ethics committee, no institutional review board, and no governance body that can approve a SAFECHAIN™ publication that fails these standards — because the independence that SAFECHAIN™'s credibility requires means that its ethics governance is the Author's personal professional responsibility, not an institutional approval process.
This is a higher standard, not a lower one. An ethics committee provides oversight that constrains conduct through process. Personal professional accountability constrains conduct through character. SAFECHAIN™'s ethics governance is character-based because process-based governance can be satisfied through compliance performance rather than genuine ethical practice — and genuine ethical practice is the only standard this research programme is prepared to meet.
5.2 The RSA Fellowship Accountability
The Author holds Fellowship of the RSA (Fellowship No. 8440854). The RSA's Fellowship commitments — to evidence-based thinking, to public benefit, and to the development of ideas that improve the social, economic, and environmental wellbeing of society — are explicitly aligned with the SAFECHAIN™ research programme's purpose and provide an additional layer of professional accountability. The RSA's institutional standing is engaged by the Author's SAFECHAIN™ research activity, and the Author is accountable to the RSA Fellowship standards in all SAFECHAIN™ research and publication conduct.
5.3 Reporting Ethics Concerns
Any person who has a concern about the ethical conduct of the SAFECHAIN™ research programme — whether a practitioner who believes their professional conduct has been misrepresented, a survivor whose testimony has been used without adequate consent, a researcher whose intellectual contribution has not been acknowledged, or a member of the public who believes SAFECHAIN™ has made false or misleading claims — may raise that concern directly with the Author at samantha@safe-chain.org. Every concern raised will receive a written acknowledgement within five working days and a substantive response within twenty working days. Where the concern identifies a genuine breach of this Ethics Statement, the response will include the specific corrective action taken.
Conclusion: Ethics as Identity
The SAFECHAIN™ Research Ethics Statement is not a compliance document. It is an identity document — a statement of what kind of research institute SAFECHAIN™ is and what kind of researcher its Author is. The standards defined here are demanding precisely because the trust of the people they protect — the survivors whose testimony grounds the evidence base, the practitioners whose work is analysed, the institutions whose governance is assessed, and the public whose policy decisions are influenced by the framework's claims — is not a reputational asset to be managed. It is a genuine obligation to be earned through conduct.
SAFECHAIN™ earns that trust through the honesty of its research, the rigour of its analysis, the transparency of its methods, the genuineness of its survivor engagement, and the accountability of its response to error. ARCH-003 is the governance document that makes those commitments constitutionally binding. It is as important as any other publication in the SAFECHAIN™ ecosystem — because without it, none of the others has the ethical foundation it requires.
ARCH-003 should be read alongside ARCH-001 (Publication Architecture v1.0), ARCH-002 (Standards Map™), REPORT-001 (Annual Report Framework™), and NVI-002 (Consent Architecture). Research ethics enquiries: samantha@safe-chain.org
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved.
SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453).
SAFECHAIN™, and all associated series, frameworks, models, architectures, engines, standards, competency frameworks, certification systems, economic models, deployment frameworks, technical architectures, and intellectual constructs are proprietary intellectual property authored and developed by Samantha Avril-Andreassen.
No reproduction, implementation, adaptation, deployment, AI training, machine learning ingestion, commercialisation, derivative development, institutional adoption, regulatory implementation, governmental implementation, software development, systems development, framework replication, architecture replication or operational implementation of any component of the SAFECHAIN™ ecosystem may occur without the prior written permission of Samantha Avril-Andreassen and SAFECHAINN Ltd.
The SAFECHAIN™ Master Publication Register™ remains the sole authoritative source of publication status, architecture lineage, governance authority, terminology control, implementation hierarchy, version control and intellectual property provenance.