Samaritans and sex calls

[ahumanfemale]

Not a TAAT but I saw elsewhere multiple mentions of the abundance of sex calls that The Samaritans receives.

I used to volunteer for a similar helpline. It was abroad and for English-speaking people. We too had regular sex callers. All - ALL - would only talk to female volunteers. I thought it was because we were a small-scale charity and it was cheaper to call us than any 0800 equivalent. It wasn't until just now that I realised our helpline wasn't unique in this. And the majority of ours were either wearing women's clothes - or fantasising about it. The underwear of underage teens was also a feature. Some clearly got off on trying to make us uncomfortable. They didn't realise we weren't uncomfortable, just bored.

And honestly, I'm fucking angry. This needs to be publicised. There are LITERALLY men out think their wank is more important than people in severe distress getting help. They LITERALLY put having a wank above someone not committing suicide. There are enough of them that The Samaritans includes their calls in its training, as our training did too.

And people - women - think these men won't go into mixed sex changing rooms and won't get thrills from making women uncomfortable and won't use their conversations to wank to either in situ or later?

The policy at my helpline changed and we were able to put the phone down on them after confirming they weren't in distress (as in they kept wanking and talking out their fantasy or whatever, rather than respond to us). This was done because someone pointed out it was abusive to expect female volunteers to be wank-fodder. I've no idea what their policy is now or what The Samaritans' policy is.

I'm disgusted that this is so common. And fwiw, we never had female sex callers.

This is where statistics come in handy. I wonder how many men receive calls like this from women, compared to women receiving calls like this from men.

Anyone who has ever been a Sam will be able to state with confidence that in the vast majority of cases it is men abusing the helpline.

In my year or so there I dealt with hundreds of sex calls from men, and spoke with other Sam's on shift who dealt with the same. I'm my time there I am only aware of one female sex caller.

I worked at a call centre once and also remember getting sex calls from men. The worst part was not realising they were a sex caller, they would deliberately pretend to want to buy insurance before doing a 'gotcha' and it always left me feeling disgusted and violated. It's a boundary violation.

I worked there for a few years and did not receive one sex call from a woman at all. I also remember a lot of abusive calls from angry men and would have to leave the building to get air it was so stressful. Employers of call centre and helpline workers should support them better and sex callers need to be permanently banned.

I was not aware of this - utterly depressing

What the fuck is wrong with men as a whole? The fact that SO MANY do it, they're fucking sick.

I worked in a bookshop for years and we got this a lot from a regular caller asking to check if we had a book in stock from the erotic section and then asking us to read the blurb out. The first time I answered to him, he asked for The Upskitt Detective to be set aside for him, so I went to check and when I came back with it be wanted me to read the first page so he could make sure it was the book he was looking for. He did it everyday.

I knew this happened with the Samaritans, I had no idea of the scale of this problem. I'd thought maybe it was a one-off random occurrence, not something that was happening on every shift to women. It's disgusting and appalling.

Obscene calls are illegal as someone else has said, so the question is why aren't the Samaritans and other organisations who field calls like this to their female volunteers/staff reporting these men to the police and prosecuting them? Their convictions could then be listed in the local papers. Name and shame. Men do this behind the cover of anonymity.

I've had one obscene phone call.

When I was 11.

A man who does that is dangerous. It's a horrible violation.

Years ago I worked as a volunteer on the nightshift of a helpline which was relatively quiet but every single shift we had the sex calls. I've posted about it here previously. There were a couple of prolific callers. They talked about their issue (wearing women's clothes), they asked questions about underwear and they would wank during the call. Almost all our volunteers were women and they knew it.

Sorry, I realise that earlier I mentioned sex of the volunteers but not sex of the callers. I've never had a sex call from a woman. In my five years of volunteering, I've twice seen male volunteers get sex calls from women - in both cases, the volunteer said it was the first time it had happened to them. Abusive calls are a bit more mixed, but still at least three-quarters male callers.

When I was 14 I started working at a shoe shop. The first call I answered as a nervous teen was to a very softly spoken posh sounding chap who asked if we had any black ladies boots. We did - he then asked me to describe them and how the leather felt - "are you touching them now are they soft or hard". My manager overheard, took the phone and hung up. Then explained that this guy was a regular caller who got off on getting the girls to touch and describe the ladies boots to him. Eye opening and something I still find disturbingm

How utterly disappointing. I haven't read this all but it's absolutely gutting as I'm hoping to be a Samaritans volunteer early in the new year. I am shocked this happens, some people are so sick.

So, bluerussian? Why does that change anything? It’s still creepy men making the calls, not women harassing men.

That is a fact.

Someone's trying to minimise male sexual abuse.

I had no idea. Yet another discovery about the male of the species that leaves me enraged.

I'm shocked but sadly not surprised anymore. I've realised that the rise of violent, degrading porn is a reflection of what actually goes on in men's minds, what they want to see and what they enjoy.

I have my suspicions about what proportion of them are secretly turned on by fantasies of doing sexual things to us without our consent, and things that would hurt and degrade us. They are so ANGRY with us for not being permanently available to them.

I think these stats would actually justify a sex-segregated Samaritans service. Males to take calls from males, females to take calls from females. This much abuse of female volunteers is utterly unacceptable.

Yes, that this is still routinely happening is beyond belief and so many men are doing this every single day and worse still getting away with it.

Take women out of the equation and route male calls to men press 1 for male 2 for female. If you get it wrong redial and try again as your call will be terminated females only handle female callers.

If the people running these lines and condoing this cared enough its very easy to stop it, and to report and convict all the offenders.

I'd have to see some extremely solid evidence before I believed that women were making an equivalent number of sexual calls to men as the number of men making sexual calls to women. And God knows how that evidence could be gathered, particularly segregated by sex not gender.

What I can certainly believe is that there would be women misusing phone services by making multiple lengthy calls without any kind of engagement with the service on offer. Though in the case of the Samaritans, presumably that kind of is what it's designed to provide.

What do you mean there temporary ?

I wonder if the men calling these helplines to get their sexual kicks are the same men who sleaze on teenage girls on the bus, who shout sexual comments to schoolgirls on the street...?

Back when I was a new teacher, I had a father come in and start talking to me about how his daughter was moody, and thought she might be getting her period, and what would I do to help her, did I have pads and tampons in my desk for girls who got their period at school, how many girls in the class had already got their period, etc. I twigged pretty quickly and made an excuse that I had a meeting. Anytime he wanted an appointment I made sure the (male) assistant principal was there, and every year after that she was put in a class with a male teacher. Sick fuck.

I don't have figures. Two women I know very well were Samaritans and both received obscene phone calls from men, one of them really got quite sick about it and packed up. The other woman coped. They both told me male volunteers also received such calls from men. I also trained as a Samaritan was told the same.

It's far more common for women to receive obscene calls from men. I don't know what can be done about it, frankly because Sams don't have the 1471 facility.

I would just cut them off and carry on speaking to genuine callers of which there are far more.

Some years ago we had an obscene phone caller at home on landline. One day I investigated, tackled him and it turned out he was a 17 year old boy who'd dropped out of school, couldn't get a job and was at home on his own, bored. I gave him a talking to and never heard from him again.
(There were others occasionally)

People nuisance calling the Samaritans are just taking advantage and it isn't fair on many levels.

PS: Sorry I meant, "...male volunteers also received such calls from women", not 'men' (though I expect some did hear the same from men).

In my very first job, I was based at a large Head Office, and the receptionist was a wonderful, wise woman called Doris. It was decided that Doris should have a couple of understudies, just in case she was ever off sick. She explained how the switchboard worked, where all the forms were, how the Director’s liked their calls put through etc and then gave us each an old fashioned metal games whistle. We looked puzzled, and she told us, you will get loads of ‘those’ calls, I give them about 30 seconds of heavy breathing, ask them why they think it is acceptable to do this and if they still don’t free up the line blow this whistle, really loud, down the line at them. It always works!

I took my ‘Doris’, as it came to be known, with me when I left and kept it for years.

Maybe a ‘Doris’ should be regulation kit in some organisations.

I think it would be truly awful if callers to Sams were segregated by sex, and it would stop the service working as it's supposed to.

As a female Sam, I'd rather take a few sex calls than have genuinely suicidal men feel unable to access the service simply because they'd prefer to talk to a woman rather than a man. Being forced to speak to a man would undoubtedly put some genuine men off, as well as the fact that there often tends to be more female than male volunteers, especially on the daytime shifts. A service like the Samaritans can't say to someone in deep distress that their call can't be taken just because there isn't man available and still maintain what they do.

Yes, the sex call may put some women off doing the job, but man you cope with it very well and are well supported with it. They are volunteers choosing to do a good thing, where the positive far outweighs the negative. No one forces women to risk getting these types of calls, we make an informed choice for the greater good.

I agree with Nails on this. Managing inappropriate use of service calls is part of what a Sam volunteer does, you’re well trained and well supported with it. Without sounding judgemental of those who leave for this reason, not everyone is able to be a listening volunteer. People leave for all sorts of reasons, not everyone makes it through the training, not everyone who applies is accepted.

Now the idea of the organisation prosecuting the high-volume sex callers - those who are making many thousands of calls a month - I find more interesting. If they were doing this to an individual it would clearly be sexual harassment. But the organisation has to be acutely aware of public perception, of its ethos of non-judgement, anonymous confidentiality etc - and would never wish to do anything that would compromise that and potentially put genuine callers off using the service.

I used to work for a cancer charity. We'd have a man call the helpline every Tuesday with one thing on his mind...

I worked for Nightline when I was at university and we got these. There were several habitual callers that we’d all recognise.