Rafael van Crimpen
Program director for Kindertelefoon Nederland

Last year on Safer Internet Day the Dutch Children’s helpline presented the outcome of a research concerning the effectiveness of chat as an online counselling channel. For years we’ve had confidential phone calls with kids and teenagers about their problems. Sexuality has long been the number one topic of our target group. But since we introduced chat as a second medium we saw two things happen:
First of all children with emotional problems preferred chat in stead of phone calls. The seriousness of their problems is severe. One out of three has a high SDQ rate which means that they are at risk of emotional problems. On the phone this is one out of five.
Second: when asked, kids and teenagers examined / rated chat-conversations with a higher degree than conversations by phone. We asked them why they preferred chat and they answered as follow:
• They don’t hear me crying
• I feel less ashamed
• No one can hear me
• Talking in private is quite scary, I mean it’s (chat) not coming out of my mouth
• There is more time to think about what you would like to say

We as workers from the Dutch Children’s helpline know the moment that they cry or feel ashamed or feel fear, even though we can’t hear or see them. But the fact that they are not aware of that, strengthens the statement in the above mentioned title: life online is what you make of it. You pretend no one can hear you crying, so you are not crying: that’s what you make of it and that is the good thing about life online: users create their own reality. Meanwhile in our case they receive, the help they need.