Call me

Fellow student, Paolo Smith’s “Call me” scheme has been running for a year now to offer help and support to teenage victims of crime. Open from 4 p.m. to midnight each day. So, I thought I’d find out why he started it and whether the scheme is a good idea or not.

Why did Paolo set it up? His mobile phone which was a present from his brother, imagine how important that was for him, was stolen. The police didn’t follow the case up. That made Paolo really upset so he decided to set up this scheme in order to help students which may have the same problem as him or something else.

The next thing you will think is how does this scheme operate? Actually it was not that difficult to set up because he easily found five boys, probably his own friends, who have to answer emails, calls and texts from pupils. These boys are all volunteers with strong and gentle personalities so there are all kinds of people involved.

I believe that this scheme works pretty well but one of the major disadvantages it has is that there are no girls involved in answering calls and emails. As a result many girls with problems may not feel comfortable sharing their queries with people from the opposite gender. For example my little sister once had a problem with a boy and she didn’t share it with anyone except my mother.

Moreover another disadvantage is that the working hours are only 8 hours from 4 in the afternoon until midnight. This time may be inconvenient for many people who want to contact the scheme. If there were more personnel, a wider range of hours could be covered so that students could contact the scheme in the morning and afternoon at least. The fact that there are very few callers each day, about 3-4 proves that.

The type of calls Paolo’s team is receiving are mostly about relationship and family issues, not about crime. Therefore there is no need to push this aspect about crime if relationship’s and family’s problems are the ones which are more frequent and bother most students.

In addition some major improvements should be done in order to make the scheme more successful and popular. There needs to be more advertising of this scheme so that more people get to know it. Also, imagine if there was an adult volunteer in this scheme, wouldn’t you trust him more than a teenager? Of course you would. An adult has more experience than a teenager, he may have had the same problem as the student is having and more importantly he is more mature so he can give you the best solution for your problem.

In conclusion, I believe that the idea of the scheme is very innovative but on the other hand, some essential changes should be made to make it more popular and productive at the same time.