Literature Review On Child Helpline

Literature Review

The literature review will introduce the latest studies on child helplines. Currently the study of child helpline is mainly in social work and psychology. From the existing literature, the value of child helpline in offering child social helps is confirmed. The further study of child helpline could be focused on operation management, technology innovation, public management and communication psychology.

The review first introduces the character of child helpline and its replacement methods for children to seek social helps. Fukkink and Hermanns, in their article "Counseling children at a helpline: chatting or calling?”, compares three methods that children use to seek social helps. They think child helpline chatting is in

This book is based on the experience of the helpline On Call Project for child abusers, which is under the support of Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies. Child helpline are telephone helplines that aim to help children and the callers are not limited as child only. In this level, On Call is a child helpline. Unlike the children callers interviewed by Fukkink and Hermanns, the major callers of On Call are adults. Those adult callers are mainly parents who have the possibility to abuse their children. Hence, when they make calls to On Call, they concern their confidence and may be very moody due to stress, guilty sense and fragile self-esteem. Colman mentioned the importance of volunteer to be trained professional and sympathetic. The situation of callers and their children are very complicated, the advice and suggestion should be cautious, and emphatic listening plays a great part in the communication with callers. This books shows how the helpline utilize its anonymity and well-trained volunteers to cope with sensitive tasks. Colman thinks On Call perform well and enlighten the study of child abuse. This book is highly praised by child protection assessment social worker P. Janie Barbour on Child Abuse and Neglect Vol.14, 1990

Their research is based on the data of three youth helplines, ChildLine, Message Home and Get Connected, and specially analyzes the young callers. This research is different from the other three studies on helpline callers because this one is more from human rights view to explore the social reason of the call motivation. Franks and Medforth find out that more female than male would call youth helpline for the male are restricted by the social gender definition to behave masculinity. This masculinity is constructed as that man shall burden more and express less, which is problematic. This gender factor has been neglected in some researches. Female tend to use phone calls and telephone messages, and man tend to use emails. The research quotes the reports of several focus group and organization on the high suicide rates of young males. Those reports indicates another reason for males prefer email better than helpline is due to confidentiality. Both gender of the minority ethnic care seriously on the confidentiality of their information, which makes them harder to trust helpline and speak out their