The BBC’s Three Girls has reached a lot of survivors and prompted them to seek support from us after watching the programme.
• We’ve had a very noticeable increase in Asian women calling who suffered abuse in childhood.
• We’ve had a lot of callers who suffered organised abuse. Often the main perpetrator is a family member who then introduces and allows other abusers to access the child.
• We’ve had a 33% increase in call attempts this week – over 2,000 call attempts this week, compared to just over 1,500 the previous week.
• We’ve also seen a seven-fold increase in people emailing us for support. We usually receive around 25-35 per week – we’ve been getting around 30 a day since Tuesday.
• Some people calling us are thinking of reporting to the police but want to talk it over with us first. Operation Hydrant’s fact sheet has details on what to expect if you’re reporting non recent child abuse to the police. https://napac.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Operation-Hydrant-Factsheet-Victim-Reporting-Dec-2016.pdf
• One in four callers to our support line have reported their abuse to police, three in four have not.
• Demand to our support line is greatly linked to media coverage about the issues survivors face, especially prime time TV programmes.
• We can’t always meet the demand on our support line, as we only have 10 staff in total, but people should be able to get through in the coming days or weeks, if they keep trying.
• Sometimes callers wait months before calling us after feelings are stirred up by a particular programme. Some people call us decades afterward the abuse they suffered, in their 70s or even 80s or 90s.