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Friday Sep 14, 2007
NSPCC in hot water
The Daily Mail reported this week that the NSPCC had "faked child abuse stories to generate cash".
Apparently, a direct mailing from the charity contained made up call transcripts detailing acts of cruelty to children. I'm honestly surprised at the naivety on display here. As I've mentioned many times before (and pardon me for sounding like a stuck record), there is a point at which the drive for transparency becomes detrimental to both the donor, and the charity in question.
In this case, the Advertising Standards Authority received several complaints about the shocking nature of the call transcripts, which it then investigated and found to be made up.
Does anyone doubt that Childline/NSPCC has received calls like this though? In reality, I'd imagine they could show us call transcripts that were even more disturbing than the made up ones they used.
What's interesting here is that the Mail focussed on the fabricated call transcripts, rather than the complaints to the ASA – which makes me wonder what they would like to see in Direct Mail packs. Perhaps real life transcripts, with pictures of the children on the phone calling Childline?
OK – I'm taking things too far there, but there is a point at which the anonymity of the people desperately seeking advice needs to be upheld and protected – at all costs. This also raises the issue of trust, which is absolutely vital to services like Childline and askTheSite, YouthNet's own Q&A service on TheSite.org.
When we have permission, we publish selected questions, with their answers, to our Q&A archive. This means others can benefit from the advice – but in our case it's relatively easy to ask for this permission because we are a web-based service that may give people a bit more time to consider what they ask us.
Obviously the situation is different for a telephone helpline – it's much harder to ask someone on the phone for permission to publish their most private worries and concerns on the phone, immediately after they've told you what they are.
If people needing advice feel the slightest danger that their privacy may not be respected, the service is compromised – which is surely too big a price to pay in return for donors reading some "real life" call transcripts.
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 8:09 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by mark on January 12, 2008 at 11:23 PM GMT+00:00 #