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Voices of Children and Young People: Global Child Helpline Data for 2020

Voices of Children and Young People: Global Child Helpline Data for 2020

In order to understand the issues faced by the children and young people who get in touch with child helplines, we survey our members around the world each year to gather information about the contacts they receive. This unique and vital data gives an insight into the ways in which children and young people experience the systems that are designed to protect them, the issues that matter to them, and the gaps in protective services.

Read Voices of Children and Young People: Global Child Helpline Data for 2020 here:

We received data from 93 child helplines, representing 69% of the 133 members of the Child Helpline International network who were invited to submit. In 2020, they received 15,176,772 contacts across 84 countries.

Specifically, our child helpline members responded to 3,142,684 counselling contacts in 2020. That means a child or young person has actively reached out to a child helpline and obtained advice, help or support over 3 million times. Most of these contacts came from young people aged between 13 and 17 years old. In 2020, mental health and violence remained the two main reasons for contact reported by the child helplines globally. Over half of all counselling contacts were related to one of these two topics.

Our publication presents the key takeaways of our analysis of the 2020 data, together with four key recommendations: that every child should have free and unrestricted access to child helpline services, that the quality and sustainability of child helplines is crucial to ensuring children’s rights, that child helpline data and youth participation should inform the policy and decision-making that affects children’s lives, and that structured partnerships are needed to eradicate violence against all children.

As well as providing the global overview, we also focus individually on each of the five regions in which our members operate, and the main reasons that children and young people make contact – including, in 2020, reasons relating to the Covid-19 pandemic that has gripped the world. Finally, we take a “deep dive” into the data, presenting all of our findings in detail.

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