** WARNING: This article may contain things readers may find distressing. **
ChildLine turns 30 years old this year, and the service allows children to gain access to trained counsellors, helping them with any problems they’re facing. In 2014-15, ChildLine carried out 300,000 counselling sessions.
Colin has been a volunteer with the service since it opened in October 1986 and has answered calls, emails and online chats to around 15,000 children. He tells us what he's learnt about being a ChildLine volunteer.
1. EVERY call is treated with respect
It can be quite common for a child to ring up and test us, and it’s important we take every call seriously. Sometimes children ring 'as a joke,' but as we were so nice, they knew they could call back when they had a serious issue.
2. Self-harm is an incredibly prevalent issue nowadays.
When I first started, one contact a month would be about suicide or self-harm, it’s now surprising if we have a call or email where a child hasn’t talked about it. The rise in the number of self-harm cases is one of the major changes ChildLine has seen.
3. You have to be strong.
It’s natural for you to want to offer that child comfort away from a phone call, but it’s important to remember to keep your head together in a time when the child has probably lost theirs. Keep them talking and help them find the solution they need.
4. It's natural to cry and it happens to everyone.
This is normally when a child’s issue is something that a counsellor can relate to, for example death or a serious illness. We're advised to go offline, talk to a supervisor and have a cup of tea and calm down. It's important to always be your best for the next child that calls for help.
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5. You have to be prepared for anything to happen.
I’ve had many children ring in the midst of committing suicide and it’s important to establish as quickly as possible how seriously they intend on fulfilling this. Once a caller wasn’t making a lot of sense, and slipped into the conversation that she’d overdosed. If I’d not been paying attention for that one moment I could have missed that. Thankfully her mum came home and I was able to infom her to take her daughter to hospital immediately.
6. You think a lot about what happens to the children you speak to
The first call I got on my very first shift was from a nine year old girl from a phone box in Northern Ireland who told me her ‘daddy was a devil.’ We managed to get a police officer and social worker to her, but I don’t know what happened to her after that. She’d be nearly 40-years-old now. You have to try and put it to the back of your mind and get along with life.
We do offer complete confidentiality to all our callers but we cannot stand by if a child is in a life-threatening situation. We can find out if they’re okay by calling the paramedics afterwards but unfortunately, the emergency services aren’t always able to save the child’s life and that’s incredibly sad. There are a lot more occasions however where they do and they come back and thank us for helping them in their time of need.
7. You can often get asked for by name
Callers know your first name and sometimes frequent callers build up a relationship with one counsellor and want to speak to just them. But with 10 nationwide call centres, it’s not always easy to put them through to that person. There are a small number of children who are allowed to speak to the same counsellor each week but we have to make special arrangements in these cases.
8. Sometimes those relationships can backfire
For example a young lady built up a regular relationship with my colleague over the course of a year, and she was just at that point where it had been approved for her to go with the young girl to social services. But the week my colleague was due to do that, she was killed in a car crash. We had to pick up the pieces with that child without letting her know the real circumstances – we had to gloss over it and that was incredibly hard for everyone.
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9. Your perception of children changes
When I started at ChildLine I was a Deputy Head teacher of a secondary school and it really helped me understand certain children’s behaviour. I began to recognise that sometimes the difficult children who came in late and were disruptive in the classroom had some underlying issues.
10. Something that seems very serious to a child at the time can bring a smile to the counsellor’s face when they hear it.
On Boxing Day 1986, a little girl rang me because she’d broken her new bike and hidden it behind the shed. I had to assure her that it wasn’t actually broken and that daddy could fix it and she felt better. The little girl’s Christmas was saved and her problem left us smiling once she had calmed down.
11. Technology is an incredibly important part of children’s lives
71% of contacts last year to ChildLine were online. Children find it easier to talk about the more difficult topics through the computer rather than the phone. Mobile phones are important too, they can sometimes allow a child to talk more safely, for example away from the family home.
12. Sometimes children just need to talk about their feelings
Parents shouldn’t get upset if their child turn to us first, it’s sometimes easier for them to speak to a stranger before they feel ready to speak to their parents. For example bereavement can be hard to talk about to a parent that always cries when it’s mentioned, or a girl that has fallen pregnant may turn to us before plucking up the courage to speak to her parents.
13. Volunteers need support too.
What we hear can be incredibly distressing and at the end of each shift we have a debrief which helps with that. And if you go home and still need to talk to someone, you can call and speak to one of the supervisors. That support is essential because otherwise it can take its toll.
14. It’s incredibly rewarding
As long as I’m able to get there to do my shift, I will be a ChildLine volunteer forever. I just want to continue to help young people any way I can.
For more information on how you can help ChildLine, please visit the NSPCC website.
