Childline report - Frightening figures

IT seems extraordinary that Childline, the support service for children who feel in jeopardy, gets 2,300 calls or messages every day.

This suggests, in a country of less than five million people, that a huge proportion of our children feel so threatened that they need the comfort offered by a stranger at the end of a phone line.

Confirming the figures and conceding that just 65% of all calls were answered, the ISPCC warned that a fall in funding could mean that even more calls will go unanswered next year.

Can it really be so that such a huge number of our children feel so alone, so isolated that they feel the need to confide in such a service? If it is we have even more problems than we thought.