Paul Harrison has a soothing voice and a zest for life that bubbles away in spite of being confronted each day at work with personal problems; those of children and young people.
He is a telephone counsellor with Kids Help Line; Australia’s only free national telephone counselling service for those between the ages of five and 18.
With seven years experience under his belt, Paul is one of the ‘long-termers’, although he says that others have been there since the service began in 1991. Back then, it was a Queensland initiative but by 1993 it had expanded nationally.
A child or young person, anywhere in Australia, can ring the service seven days a week, 24 hours a day, on their toll free number. Calls are not vetted, so the telephone counsellors must be able to cope with diversity as well as adversity.
Many of the 100 or so counsellors are psychologists and social workers, and all of them have undergone rigorous training and supervision tailored to meet the specific needs of Kids Help Line.
‘Some shifts (usually six hours) might be quite heavy, and you might only talk to a handful of callers, while on other shifts, you might talk to 100 children and young people’, says Paul.
Calls from those at the older end of the spectrum can take an hour or more, particularly if the situation has reached crisis point. If the caller is at risk of harm, the counsellor may put them in contact with other services.
Children as young as five often call too. ‘They like to have a chat, tell you what their day was like and what they’ve been doing.’ Like their attention span, their calls are usually short.
One central feature of Kids Help Line is the child-centred focus: working with children and young people on their level, and the sort of language that they bring to counselling.
Although Paul says that in some cases it may be best in the long term for a child or young person to see a counsellor face-to-face, Kids Help Line is always there.
‘What we do well here at Kids Help Line is listen.’ The statistics back this claim. On average, 20,000 kids ring the service each week. Many are repeat callers, and some have ongoing contact with one counsellor over years.
Paul adds that the most common comment made by callers is that they are ringing to talk because ‘nobody listens’.