Freephone Helpline: 0800 374 618

The Freephone Helpline operates 24 hours a day receiving emergency calls from people who are or have just been attacked and need emergency help. People often call because the police are slow to answer or have underplayed the seriousness of the hate crime suffered by callers.

Aims of the Freephone Helpline

The overall aim of the Helpline is to provide good quality information to callers to help them make decisions about their case, to intervene in cases to reduce the likelihood of repeat incidents and to encourage statutory agencies to tackle perpetrators.

Specifically the aims of the Freephone Helpline are

• to provide immediate access to confidential advice and telephone support to victims of racial and domestic violence across the country 24 hours a day 365 days a year;
• to provide access to support to victims of racial harassment in their own language where possible;
  to intervene in emergency situations by seeking help from statutory agencies where the calls personal safety is at risk;
• to provide access to volunteers to visit victims who are in personal danger where possible;
• to act as a gateway for callers to local agencies and support networks where they exist; and
• to help train and support other agencies and support networks to provide a good quality service for victims of racial harassment.

How we deal with calls

The Helpline is accessible to callers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Calls are taken by workers and the team of volunteers who help us run the service.  The personnel taking the call will take details of the caller and establish the nature of the problems they are facing, and assess whether the callers safety is at risk.

We will then advise the caller on their rights, outline a course of action that will help them to resolve their situation, and provide information on local agencies that may be able to assist them during office hours. In some cases in London, Midlands and South West the case may be taken up by the Monitoring Group.

If the caller’s safety is at risk the staff will make calls on the caller’s behalf to the police and/or local authority. This is more difficult in less serious incidents because agencies may be unwilling to discuss a case without appropriate written authorisation.

The callers to the will then receive follow up calls to ensure that the quality of service provided meets their needs.

Calls to the Service

During each year, we receive around 4,000 calls from people across the country. As can be seen from the tables below the number of the callers to the Helpline during the past two years has been relatively stable at around 300 calls each month.

History of the Emergency Service

The Monitoring Group set up helpline for victims of racial and domestic violence over twenty years ago. At the time, few statutory agencies had paid much attention to meeting the needs of black and ethnic minority people, and unsurprisingly the issue of racial violence was not seen as a social issue in need of a policy response.

The Monitoring Group immediately recognised that most importantly they needed to ensure victims of racial violence were physically safe from attacks, and in order to do this they had to provide actual one to one support to victims when they needed it most, and they had to act as legal advocates to ensure that the statutory bodies acted swiftly. The service also had to be available outside of office hours since the frequency of physical attacks was highest in the evenings.

Although much has changed at the policy level over the past twenty years, the patterns of racial violence and the needs of victims have not altered much, and the current aims of the Freephone Helpline are not far removed from the original intentions.