Author: Neil Henderson

For Most of my working life I was a Social Worker, first working with young people in residential care, in Approved schools and the remand home system and in 1970 moving to Warwick to open an Assessment centre for 30 adolescents. When I look back at those children I was working with in the 60's and 70's I would say probably 90% of them had been abused but I hadn’t been trained in what behaviours to look for or the right questions to ask.

In 1989 I moved to open the Stratford Mental Health Resource Centre and I found that a lot of women who were presenting with mental health problems had been sexually abused as children and when I listened to their histories of abuse I realised that the abuse was the underlying problem of their mental illness. 

I suddenly became the expert and I was receiving so many referrals that I brought some of them together in a small group for support and so that they could meet with others who had been abused, because they felt that they were the only ones.

During the groups, they wrote a lot of poems to help their healing and eventually I obtained a small grant from the Arts Foundation which helped them to publish their own book of poetry which they called ‘The Silent Scream’.

It was with the profits from the sale of this book that Safeline was first established.

The women wanted to provide services for others which had not been available for them during their healing. We established a helpline which was run from my spare bedroom to start with. We launched Safeline on International Women’s day March 8th in 1994.

It soon became apparent, that the calls were from women who needed to talk more about how they felt but because some of them were not presenting with a mental illness it wasn’t in my job specification to help them. So I took early retirement to help them and that’s why I established the charity.

I had no idea how to set up a charity and had to learn as I went along. We were by this time getting profits from the book which exceeded the cost for maintaining the helpline and once we had a set of accounts, we were able to apply for grants. At this point myself and the group were all giving our services voluntarily; we established ourselves as trustees and called the charity SAFE which stood for SURVIVING ABUSE with FRIENDSHIP and EDUCATION. However when we wrote to the charity commission, we were told that someone else was using that name and so we became SAFELINE.

I applied for a lottery grant in 1996 which enabled us to set up offices in Warwick and employ 2 staff to serve the whole of Warwickshire including Solihull and Coventry. 

I set up a website and we began to receive calls from all over the country, I was being asked to conferences and workshops to talk about the work we were doing.

In those early days when I first began to talk about abuse; people would look embarrassed, change the subject, or even walk away. It was a very high mountain to climb to be accepted but I was very determined and wasn’t going to allow the subject to be pushed under the carpet yet again.

By this time we were running groups in Warwick and Leamington, Nuneaton, and Stratford. We put a resource pack together and did training to colleges of further education, police, and Social Services. I wasn’t shocked in those days to find that colleges were not providing training about sexual abuse in their curriculums but I was very shocked to learn 20 years further on that this is still the case today for a lot of institutions.

In the year 2000 we received an award of £25K from Smith Kline Beecham for innovative work in health care, for the service we were providing to the prisons, which just about tied us over until 2001 when we received a second lottery grant which was unheard of in those days.

We had a core group of 30 volunteer counsellors all giving their services for free; without these volunteers SAFELINE wouldn’t exist. Over the years they have willingly given up their time to attend the training provided for new volunteers and to provide counselling for SAFELINE. This is what helps us to continue to provide services for free, we just ask for donations from people who can afford to pay.

In the private sector these very same counsellors could command £60 an hour for their services I am so pleased that because of them we are still able to provide a free service to those that need it.

Abuse isn't something that can be sorted out with six sessions of counselling which is all that the NHS can provide. We have to help undo years of upset, shame, anger, and relationship problems along with fears of doctors and dentists and this can take years to undo.

Over the years we have provided training to the Prison and probation  services, Police, Social Services, Education, doctors, dentists etc to name but a few.

I am very proud that Safeline has now been running for 25 years, I never imagined in those early days that the charity would last this long and help so many survivors

Safeline now has over 60 volunteers helping in all areas of running the charity  and I cannot stress enough how proud of them I am.