- The Guardian,
- Wednesday December 14, 2005
Around 400 people every year call a unique confidential charity helpline, claiming to have been abused by a health or social care professional. For some callers, the admission may come decades after the incident because it has taken them years to pluck up the courage to ask for help. The charity Witness has cases on file of women who are now in their 60s and have only just begun to acknowledge the abuse they suffered from their family doctor when they were teenagers.
Witness chief executive Jonathan Coe says the number of allegations of abuse that come to the charity's attention are probably only the tip of the iceberg. It is a view shared by a Department of Health inquiry this year into patient sexual abuse by two psychiatrists in North Yorkshire. The inquiry called for a national database on cases of patient abuse to be set up to try to establish the true picture of the problem.
However, Witness has discovered that allegations of abuse, especially sexual or emotional, are not restricted to doctors. It has cases involving professionals from across the health and social care spectrum. Coe says: "Whatever the true figures are, it is clear to us that a lot more attention needs to be paid to this issue."
The charity, which has offices in London and, until last month, was known as the Prevention of Professional Abuse Network (Popan), has a team of five trained support and advocacy workers who, by talking and listening over a number of telephone sessions, help callers to come to terms with their abuse.
Coe says: "It's the betrayal of trust that causes so much damage. They find it difficult to trust any health or social care worker again. For some people, it has meant that they have lost out on healthcare services because that sense of trust has disappeared."
The charity also supports callers if they want to pursue an official complaint or a case for damages against their abuser. But, says Coe, only around 10% of callers want to take some kind of punitive action. "The decision about what action to take, if any, is entirely in the hands of the caller," he says. "For some people, they just want the opportunity to put it behind them, while others want to take some kind of formal action. In those cases, we provide information about the various options."
Witness is trying to raise £30,000 to help meet this year's predicted shortfall in the telephone support line's £140,000 annual running cost, so the £6,000 it has received by being a Guardian Charity Award winner has come at just the right time. Coe says: " We will spend the money on the helpline. At the moment, there is a 12-week waiting list for sessional support work and unless we can raise the £30,000 the level of advocacy and support work we can offer will have to be reduced."
The prize computer will also be useful because the charity's system is nearly 10 years old, he says. But the biggest benefit in winning the award is the attention it brings to this particular kind of abuse. Coe says: "The issue just doesn't get the attention it needs."
