Transcript
SHAMIMA ALI: The significance first of all is that the profile of domestic violence has been lifted because the government is partnering with us, it's a toll-free line and it has been launched with a lot of fanfare and this will enable women who often are poverty-stricken to call. It will enable them to call a toll-free line. So they can have access to any phone, they can ask people for their phones and call the toll-free lines. In the last two or three days, we've already had over forty calls. It does seem that a toll-free line makes a lot of difference to women's lives. They have given us the funding to do this for a year, then we'll have to discuss the future of it. We have just employed four more new counsellor advocates and I've got a team of about eleven counsellors so all of them take turns but about four of them have been specially trained and they are training other people how to do this because the system is quite complex. It's going to be very easy to collect data, also to look at trends and things like that.
SALLY ROUND: You say you've had 40 calls in the last couple of days. How many would you normally have had without the toll-free number?
SA: In a whole week we might get about 20 calls or so, almost half of that, 20, 25 calls in a week. That is, like, new people calling in.
SR: This is going to be a huge upswing in your work then. Do you think you've got enough resources?
SA: Yes we have. You see we have already had that 30 years of experience, so it's not like a new set of people doing this work. We know where the referral services are, we know how to make the other service providers do the work, we know how to get things going so that is why we are able to cope. We thought very carefully about this. We've planned it very well, with the counselling staff, with the counselling department of the crisis centre. We do realise it's an enormous task we have ahead of us but we have full confidence because of our experience of being around for 32 years doing this work, knowing all the pitfalls as well as all the good things that can happen, we are quite confident that we will be able to cope.
SR: So basically the significance of this toll-free line is that you're opening this up to people who can't afford to call in, who may be in remote areas?
SA: Yes, very remote areas. You know we're already getting calls from the maritime areas which is a really good thing because that is where the outreach is the least and also the national survey on intimate partner violence indicates that the Eastern Division, which is mostly made up of the maritime areas, has the highest prevalence rate so this is also a good way to reach out to them. Most of the calls have been on domestic violence and you know we get other calls on child abuse, inaction from other service providers and those are the usual kind of calls you get at the crisis centre also. But the trend we are seeing in the last three days is about lack of responses or appropriate responses, which we have always outlined as a challenge, from some service providers. Also, as usual, we get men calling who also are having issues of their wives have run away or something like that and how can we help them. So we refer them to the appropriate service provider.
