Inappropriate callers on pregnancy/birth or breastfeeding helplines

[Goannaforanna]

The conversation about La Leche League and trans women wanting to breastfeed has brought to my mind something I heard years ago about men calling pregnancy and breastfeeding helplines and being creepy. Is there anyone here who has had that experience? I wondered how orgs like LLL are dealing with that now?

And mental health charities helplines it is a big issue for them too.

Any phone line will get them sadly. At least one every shift when I was a samaritans volunteer

I recall someone on here saying it's very common on the rape crisis lines, that they'd get someone claiming be a brother/father/husband of a victim but they'd really draw out the details of what 'happened' and it'd be clear that it was a man playing out a fantasy.

'Brent/Brenda calls' at the Samaritans.

Horrible story about the man who insisted women indulge the calls:

https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/befriending-heavy-breathers

Wow the breaking down of legitimate female boundaries really out on show on that one.

We even get them on 999 calls.

Im afraid every "helpline" gets them. At college I've "manned"* a helpline supposedly for girls/women and had drunken men ring up and tell me they have 12 inches ready for me.

*Prefer "staffing" but... !

Absolutely. More chillingly that originating from the leadership than that from the service users.

Definitely used to get men abusing rape crisis lines and that was back in the 80s.

There should be a way to get these creeps. Surely it's harassment or misuse of communication, especially on 999 calls. Financial penalties?

Used to get those calls when I worked in a restaurant. They called to wind up the waitresses and it was really tedious.

Literally every service with a publicly available phone number gets the heavy breathers. I used to be a Samaritan.

Friends who worked at Directory Inquiries back when that was a thing used to get them as well.

I know a couple of the lll leaders who've been trying to fight this rubbish. Over a decade ago when I was in a local LLL group that had an extremely supportive Facebook group, I know that the leaders regularly had to deny creepy men access to the group.

It was a very well known issue

Sweet Jesus.
I agree with @Bixaweet , fine the creeps and timewasters.

Yup. Used to work on a Macmillan Helpline and we'd have a regular caller who would ring up as ask about our tights and underwear. As soon as you hung up he'd ring back to try to speak to another women. The managers would take all of the women out of the Mac hunt group and he'd go away for that day. We used to run several different charity helplines from one organisation but Macmillan was the only one we got calls on as we had a free phone number.

Yes. Me too. We only had the lines open for limited hours per week and then these creeps would ring. Fortunately we were a women only service so they got hung up on very quickly.

Hmmm. I wonder if it still is, and how they deal with it.

Do men get them as well? Could female voices be changed to male voices via AI on some of the help lines in future (not the rape crisis ones of course)?

If he was so keen on "helping" the perverts, why didn't he recruit men to take those calls? Why were the staff assigned to speak to masturbators 100% women?

I used to volunteer for Childline (years ago, before the NSPCC became weird) and we got the masturbators there too. We weren't forced to stay on the line though.

They were a problem on the customer service phone lines at a bank where I used to work, too.

Wow, I have worked in telephone call centres before and luckily never had one but also never had any training on how to deal with it!

He ... goes into that in the article. In unpleasantly gleeful detail.

Let's be blunt - the founder of the Samaritans was an abusive creep.