Ok, I'm a current Sam volunteer, and a woman, and I note that other Sams' experience of other branches is different from mine, and possibly worse, but I can only speak from my own experience. There are lots of things that could be improved - of course there are, we're human - but without the ethos of confidentiality and lack of judgement we would simply not get calls from many of the people we most want to help. Unfortunately because confidentiality is central, I can't give specific examples, I can only make general points about some of the things being said on this thread. I had hoped to have some statistics before coming back to this thread, but can't find any recent ones.
First, setting aside sex calls, do women on this thread not have any inkling of why many female callers might urgently ask whether the call is genuinely confidential? Confidentiality is really central to our service: we also take a fair number of calls from children who are too frightened to call Childline because they know Childline isn't confidential in all circumstances. You can argue that that's wrong, but there are plenty of callers who simply wouldn't call at all if it weren't for the promise of confidentiality. Should they simply be left with no-one to talk to? For that reason, calls aren't recorded, ever. So as Cwentryth says, it would be the volunteers' word against the caller's. Does anyone have stats for successful prosecutions of obscene phone calls?
Second, why stop at sex calls? Why not shop someone to the police every time any caller indicates they might be involved in criminal behaviour? The call I would most have liked to see prosecuted if criminal prosecution were an option wasn't a sex call at all, it was a teenage girl (clearly, with her mates giggling in the background) trying to perpetrate a hoax that would really have upset any volunteer who believed her. Shall we set the police on her? I've taken calls from men and women who've done things that they know to be criminal, which often cause them distress: do I tell them the price of a listening ear is that I'll report them to the police?
Finally, anyone who thinks it's our job to repeat a script when someone is thinking of taking their own life was, frankly, a really crap volunteer (there are no scripts, for the record). The suggestion that Sams couldn't be kind is just rubbish. We are there, we make it clear to the caller that we care about them, we ask repeatedly if they want to call an ambulance or if they would like us to do it for them - the one thing we absolutely do not do is tell them not to take their own life. The agency is theirs. Self-determination (in all things up to and including suicide) is core to Samaritans. Nightline, which I've also done, is virtually identical in all respects except that volunteers are allowed to try expressly to persuade someone not to take their own life. In my experience, it's an amazingly successful approach: people very often don't go through with it if they feel they've really been heard. (And I also think that sometimes suicide is a perfectly rational choice, given the lives that some people have lived - who am I to try to talk them out of it?)
It's fine to think Samaritans is no good and you don't want to give your money to it, but you need to recognise that some of the changes suggested on this thread would undermine it to the point that its service would be really pretty useless and unable to reach the people who most need it.