Stand With Meg is a public registry, report, and court actor record built from what families have lived through and chosen to put on the record. This page explains, in plain language, exactly how that record is collected, reviewed, deduplicated, and published — and what we deliberately do not do.
Submissions come through the Stand With Meg Family Rights Survey. The survey asks families about location, case type (family court, child welfare, custody, GAL, evaluator, agency involvement), case status, time in the system, custody outcomes, due-process concerns, financial harm, parenting time lost, court actors involved, and whether they feel safe naming specific actors. Each field is optional unless it is required for the submission to be useful as data.
The report shows aggregate counts only — total families, states represented, countries represented, financial harm in dollars, parenting time lost in months. Individual submissions are not shown publicly unless the family explicitly chose a public option.
The survey gives every family four visibility levels:
Families can change their visibility level at any time by re-submitting or contacting the team. Changing visibility backwards (e.g. from public to anonymous) removes the previously-published quote from the next report refresh.
Every new submission is reviewed before any quote, name, or county-level detail goes public. The review checks for:
A submission that fails review is held back from public surfaces but still counts toward private aggregate totals (with the family’s consent).
Families sometimes submit more than once — to update their case, to correct an entry, or because they thought the first one didn’t go through. Public-facing counts dedupe by:
+aliases collapse to one).The most recent reviewed submission is treated as the family’s current entry. Earlier rows are kept as a private audit trail and never surfaced publicly.
State Family Rights Reports are generated automatically from live Supabase data once a state crosses a submission threshold. Each report aggregates the state’s submissions into:
Reports are regenerated daily from the live dataset, so they update as families join. State-level totals never include identifiable case detail.
A quote only appears publicly when the submitting family explicitly opted into public visibility for that quote. The quote is preserved as written by the family — Stand With Meg does not edit content for tone or rhetoric — but obviously identifiable third parties are removed before publication.
Quotes can be retracted. If a family asks for a quote to come down, it is removed from the next report refresh and the underlying row is marked for re-review.
The Court Actor Registry — judges, attorneys, GALs, evaluators, CPS workers, and agencies named by families — is the most sensitive surface on the site. Public naming of any court actor requires:
Families below the threshold can still see actor entries in the private report. Public-facing naming only happens when the pattern is independently corroborated. Stand With Meg treats every actor entry as family-reported, not adjudicated.
The registry only exists because families have chosen to put their cases on it. The faster more families add their stories, the more clearly the patterns can be seen.