Strong Local Voice, Strong Local Champion

Small People's Sentinel: Annette interviews Esther Rantzen

Launched in a blaze of publicity 20 years ago, Esther Rantzen's ChildLine continues to provide a lifeline to abused children. Annette Brooke meets its guiding spirit.

Annette Brooke interviews ChildLine's Esther Rantzen

It was 20 years ago this month that, following a BBC survey on adults' and children's experience of child abuse, ChildLine was launched. In the first few weeks, volunteers faced 50,000 attempted calls per day: today, they face an average 4,500 attempted calls.

I met with the charity's patron Esther Rantzen, and I asked her how the programme That's Life, perhaps more widely remembered for covering humorous subjects, came to cover an issue like child abuse, and how this led to the formation of ChildLine.

"The BBC asked me for any thoughts for a replacement for 'Drugwatch' (an item where viewers were asked to share in confidence their own drug use)," she explained. "I said we should do something about child abuse. I was aware that when these terrible stories emerged in the press - of children found too late, bodies of children murdered - I couldn't read them because they were so painful, and I thought journalistically that was interesting: why do I find this so difficult to read, and so many other people too?"

But did she know then how pioneering her work was, not just for television but also for child protection? "I had no idea how revolutionary a concept it was, to extrapolate from a BBC helpline and set up ChildLine specifically created for children, to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year, telling the children that they could ring this number, this simple number, we would help their problem, and of course they would be, if you like, in control of what then happened, because if they don't like the advice, they don't agree with it, they just hang up," she says.

"There were no self-referring agencies in this country then, indeed very few in the world. If I'd known how revolutionary it was I might have been more frightened.

"We had to shut down those lines: in the end they were open 48 hours, because there was such an impact on them. I remember walking round with this cloud in my head: how many thousands more children had tried to get through, would get through? What became clear, what I hadn't realised, was that talking about their suffering on the phone gave these children a feeling of confidence that they were not to blame, that maybe this could be stopped, which they hadn't had before. So that was a revelation."

Children are offered anonymity when they call ChildLine, and I wondered if this made follow-up work difficult.

"When a child has so little in his life or her life, they hang on to what they've got. The fear in these children's hearts is very often, 'If I tell you who I am, you will shatter my world, and I have so little in my world I must hang on to it'. The vast majority of our children are anonymous, but we do ask for some kind of name, so that we can find the file again, and geographical area, and the age: that way you can find out if the child rings back, so they don't have to give the story again. And then we explore the child's world - who is there?

"First thing we say, if this is serious enough for us to really be concerned for the child, 'Your safety is paramount, your safety is the most important thing'. If we feel the child's life is at risk and that the child is in immediate danger, we will breach confidentiality, and we will tell the child. But in most cases when they've been living with the situation, we will say, 'Let's talk about who there is, who really cares about you that you could talk to. What about Mum? What about Granny? What about an aunt? Is there a teacher? Is there the parent of a friend?' And if they can identify someone, we'll say, 'Okay, let's practise, I'm Mum, tell me'. And the child will practise, and you say 'Okay, how do you think that will go?'"

But does ChildLine face hoax calls, or children making up stories of abuse? "Not at all," insists Esther. "We get silent calls, so we don't know why the child's ringing; we get children who are larking about; we get children with mental health problems. I've never spoken to a child who's said, 'Mr Smith of 16 Acacia Road is doing horrible things to me,' because children talk about their feelings," she said. "The only person I have spoken to who's said, 'it's this person at this address', was the child asking me to get the police.

"All the other children I've spoken to have been talking about their feelings, sometimes in tears, having enormous problems getting it into words, needing all the support in the world, taking time over a number of calls. But we know if a child keeps ringing back and seems to have something else to talk about each time, there's something going on. So the answer is: to my knowledge, nobody has described to me a call in which a child has maliciously alleged crimes which have turned out to be a hoax. We get so many calls, and maybe they now know that calls will be investigated, but I can only say in my experience, no."

Despite its valuable work, ChildLine has faced financial crises, most recently in July 2005, when the charity's night service was under threat of closure. How did this happen, and is ChildLine now safe for the foreseeable future?

"I think things are going to get worse, not better, for niche domestic charities," she predicts. "I put it down to global warming, and my logic goes like this: last year, you would have noticed hurricanes, floods, famine. And when those catastrophes happen, they happen in my sitting room and yours because the media are so flexible, so omnipresent, that they can bring you the pictures of the children's bodies being dragged out from the ruins of a building in Pakistan the day it happens. When the media have got pictures like that, they will have no space for the stories about ChildLine's children, whose pictures we cannot show you.

"Thus when ChildLine was launched in 1986, I took part in 19 different programmes on radio and television, some of them primetime on the major channels. When we launched our emergency appeal last summer because our funds were down to about half, our appeal was not carried on any primetime national television programme. We were on ITN News at lunchtime, we were on Radio 4's Today programme, but we weren't on any of the primetime news programmes. But it worked, because we got £750,000, it was wonderful.

"I don't think there's a compassion-fatigue out there, I think there's a journalistic overload. We were very fortunate because the NSPCC agreed to take us on, we merged with the NSPCC, it was the perfect fit, they didn't have a phone line for children to self-refer, they've got an excellent child protection line for adults, so it's a wonderful parallel service."

So what would Esther Rantzen of ChildLine ask parliamentarians at Westminster to do, to best help those children who call?

"There are more children disclosing abuse than ever before: they're disclosing it to their families, they're disclosing it to ChildLine, the police and social services are investigating, the children's complaints are well-founded - but we are getting fewer convictions than ever: why? Because our legal system is designed to frighten adults into telling the truth, it is heavily biased against the child," she argues.

"There was a commission set up by the Home Office nearly 20 years ago that produced the Pigot Report, it said in its final recommendations that this is the first step: we should be looking at juvenile justice. We should be looking at children and the law: is the adversarial system the right place to hear these cases? There are other countries - in Scandinavia, for example - where a child never sets foot in the courtroom, where the investigation is done with great tenacity and meticulous rigour outside the court.

"There are far better ways of getting to the truth than an adversarial system that is designed to frighten adults, and which militates against children, still to this day. It's still allowing 80-90 per cent of those who commit offences against children to walk free without 16 October 2006 The House Magazine 19 going near a court. And when we do that we are condemning many, many more children to lives of untold suffering. It is time that we set up another commission on juvenile justice, and that MPs, those who have been lawyers and those who have not, look again at the hopeless failure of the law to protect vulnerable children."

My objectives in this interview were to recall the origins of ChildLine and to trace its development, and also to reflect on society's attitudes to child abuse over the last 20 years. Esther explained that children now speak out sooner, perhaps after six months of abuse, rather than waiting many years. The contribution of ChildLine to children's lives has been enormous. Sadly, my conclusions are that we still need this vital service.