To trust is to accompany

A person who has suffered abuse tends, in a great many cases, to live through it alone. Isolation becomes a common factor. After becoming aware of the abuse, victims often think that nobody will believe or understand them, that nobody will offer support. And the person who committed the abuse seeks to create this feeling in the victim in order to ensure their own impunity. For this reason accompaniment is fundamental in the healing process, and it requires an additional effort from the person who has suffered abuse.

Below we present four stories of people who were able to break through that barrier and begin to be accompanied, in different services of the Fundación para la Confianza.

• Mutual Support GroupsGroups of five to ten people, accompanied by professional facilitators. It is not therapy: it is a space to find out that you are not alone.
• Legal supportLawyers and other professionals advise, guide and accompany people who are starting, or want to start, legal proceedings.
• Psychological guidanceProfessionals accompany disclosure and the start of recovery and reparation processes. No two cases are alike.
• Línea LibreA free, confidential and remote psychological support service for children and adolescents.

Mutual Support Groups (GAMU)

The Mutual Support Groups (GAMU) are a form of accompaniment that the Fundación para la Confianza began developing several years ago. They work by bringing together groups of five to ten people who, accompanied by professional facilitators, can share and rebuild experiences, recognising themselves in others. It is not therapy, but it is a space in which direct or secondary victims of abuse can experience, in a concrete way, that they are not alone.

Cristóbal

“Just found a call-out of my PE teacher for rape in 2003, the same guy who abused me for years between 2006 and 2008, who knows how many more victims there are... YOU’RE GOING DOWN!”

Message posted on Twitter

It was a short message, but a powerful one. With those words Cristóbal Saavedra, now 26, shared on Twitter an accusation against the person who had abused him in his childhood.

He does not remember clearly where he was or what he was doing, but he does remember what he felt: “I froze, I was in a bad way. I didn’t see it coming, I thought I was one of the first to have been abused by this bastard, and it was heavy finding out there were loads more people, that someone else had gone through it long before (at another school and more than ten years earlier), and it was mental, really intense, shocking. I got really nervous and my first reaction was to share the post, share it on my social media, like I had something in my gut, a huge rage”.

Since 2015, the year in which he began to realise inwardly what had happened to him, Cristóbal had not talked to anyone else who had been through a situation of abuse.

Feeling alone, however, did not last forever. “I spent several years pretending it was nothing. From the moment I realised that what had happened to me was abuse, I thought it hadn’t really affected my life, and I said to myself: ‘whatever, why ask for help’”, he recalls.

“Time went by, several years, and I started to feel more and more disgust, remorse, guilt, lots of things that made me really unstable. I started to distrust people a lot, and there came a point when I felt the need to deal with it, to ask for help with it”, he says. That was when he heard about the Fundación para la Confianza.

“In 2018, with the help of a friend, I decided to go to the Foundation. The truth is I went without any expectations, I just felt a real need to do something about it”.

He met up one afternoon with the same friend who had told him about the Foundation, to have a coffee, smoke a cigarette and talk. He was calm, but expectant. They walked to a house on Manuel Montt, where the Foundation was based for several years until 2019: “we knocked on the door, and a girl let us in, we hadn’t made an appointment or anything, and straight away they asked whether I was looking for someone or something like that. We managed to say that we’d come looking for help or advice, that we’d seen on the website that you could come in or call, but that we’d preferred to come in”, Cristóbal recalls.

After he explained that he was a survivor of abuse, they showed him into a room. He waited a while and the Foundation’s lawyer arrived; they talked about the kinds of help available and what they could start to do. “I felt they really had my back, unlike other places where people sort of don’t know how to handle it when someone brings up this kind of thing. I felt really welcomed and understood, and in that same chat was the first time they told me about the GAMU”. At first Cristóbal did not have much confidence in what they suggested. He hesitated, and it seemed a little strange to him.

The GAMU (Mutual Support Groups) are a form of accompaniment offered by the Fundación para la Confianza in which, through group sessions, direct or secondary victims of abuse can accompany one another and work together through listening, group activities and group work. All of this is accompanied by people who moderate and facilitate and who have experience working with victims of abuse or in psychology.

“Before they told me I had no idea about any of it. I imagined it a bit like the Alcoholics Anonymous scenes you see in films, but I didn’t really know what to think. At first I hesitated a bit. The idea of being with people I didn’t know, with people I felt were going to judge me, made me think: “who are these people who are going to tell me whether I’m all right or not?”, it was all my own distrust”, he recalls.

“The thing with me is that I feel people tend to normalise others, and there’s a kind of invisible power at work about what has to be normal, and that made me distrustful, but I said whatever, I’ll go, I’ll give it a try”.

It was not easy at the beginning, though. As he tells it, the first time he took part he felt strange: “when I got there I remember I started watching everyone, there were three people leading it, two men and a woman, and among the participants, who at that point were about eight of us, there were some pretty young people, me at 23, I think there was a guy who was 20 or 21, and also older people, over 30, and there was even a man who had already retired. They were all people who had gone through abuse as kids, and of course, each with their own story”.

“The first thing was basically introducing ourselves a bit, trying to build some trust, and if anyone wanted to tell a bit about their case they could, but without any pressure. I looked hard at everyone’s faces, as if to find similarities in the things they did or said. Some had suffered abuse for a long time, like I had, others just once. It was heavy meeting people who, in spite of that, had made a family, who had already made their lives. I remember there were three people who had children”.

After that first time, he did not miss a single session. Some of the people who were there on that occasion never came back, but Cristóbal kept going, and for four months he was helped and helped himself alongside others. For him, this place became sacred.

“It gave me this feeling of being in a safe space, with people who in one way or another had lived through something similar to me, who could understand me. Sometimes I could talk about certain fears and there were people who shared them too and they were the same ones I had. Fear of repeating the story, fear of relating to people, those were the things that made me keep going, it was like a place where you’d be for a while, and you could go and not say anything, just be there, and that was already enough”.

The GAMU, as Cristóbal explains, “were never presented to me as therapy, because the facilitators weren’t therapists. It was a space that complemented therapy with a psychologist, which I started going to at the same time, also thanks to the Foundation, but these groups give you lots of tools to understand that, in one way or another, you’re not alone”.

And from then on, he began to realise that these spaces were giving him a support that, until then, he had not been able to find. “Getting to know other people’s stories really helps you realise that you’re not the one to blame. I also think these are subjects that have to stop being taboo, and it’s essential that we start talking about them, above all, first, among those of us who have lived through it. So even though it isn’t therapy, I do feel it’s a tool that can help people heal. It helped me heal a lot”.

“I started to feel calmer about talking about it, and much more able to discuss the subject, to deal with it. As I kept going to the GAMU I also started opening up more with my psychologist, it was brilliant”.

Up to that point, although Cristóbal had begun to open up his case on a personal level, he had not yet taken any legal action. He needed to be well, and to have the tools necessary to face a process of that kind. Eventually he began, helped by Arturo Greene, a lawyer at the Foundation.

During 2019 he had to go and give a statement at the Public Prosecutor’s Office and, before a judge, tell what had happened to him. As he recalls, it was one of the hardest moments, but also a liberating one. After that “I stepped back a bit, I said: right, I’ve given my statement, the justice system will have to do its part”.

He got on with his life and focused intensely on his career as a photographer: taking photos, publishing them and trying to make a living from them.

At the beginning of 2020 events connected with his case started to move much faster than he had expected. He got in touch with other victims of the man who had abused him, who had suffered abuse at his school a couple of years before him, and also after him. Some agreed and got in touch with the Foundation, but others found it harder: “one day one of the guys called me to apologise for leaving me hanging, because a couple of weeks earlier he’d stopped answering me, but I get it anyway, it’s not easy to deal with”.

The whole thing blew up on social media in April. “Someone did a call-out on Instagram of the guy who had abused me. It was a massive call-out, for things that had happened earlier at another school, before me, and it blew up like crazy, it went really viral. It reached me and I posted it on Twitter, and it exploded there too”.

“When I read the call-out, apart from the anger, sadness and pain I felt, I felt like I knew this person, but obviously I didn’t. The next day we called each other and talked for a long time. We felt a really intense closeness about it, and that’s when I told him I was bringing a criminal complaint. I put out the tweet and loads more people came forward to tell me they’d been through something like that too. It was a relief all the same, feeling you’re not alone, up to a point I had also questioned what had happened to me, or what I was doing. Like I’d say ‘what’s the point’, sometimes not even I believed what had happened to me, and after this it was like: ‘mate, it’s true, nobody can tell me it isn’t’”.

As a result of the call-out, the number of people accusing the man who had abused Cristóbal grew from just one to nine.

“With the guys who are bringing the criminal complaint with me we made a WhatsApp group, and I had the idea of meeting up, of doing a sort of GAMU but just for this case. Having done it before obviously helped me put this group together, and it helped us a lot, because there were lots of us and because, even though the guy who did the call-out didn’t do it with any intention other than getting it off his chest, it made a lot of people relive this case in their lives, and they were in a really bad way”.

“Because of that. people came forward who’d had the same thing happen in ’97. Ten years before me, they had already been abused by this bastard, so the whole thing was mental, and we were able to create a space of emotional support, of having each other’s backs, that wasn’t just about going to talk about it, but a place where you could be at ease, and talk if you needed to. Not long ago we got together, we had a meet-up on Zoom and it was brilliant, we were on for about three hours, talking about it for a good while, but then we started talking about other things, it was good, so yeah, going to the GAMU helped me, I don’t know if I’d have come up with the idea of all of us getting together if I hadn’t had that experience before”.

These days, as he tells it, they do not talk much in that group, “but when we need to talk about it, we do. One of the guys had to give his statement virtually at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and we were all there giving him support and encouragement, and afterwards he talked and said he’d felt really relieved after speaking. It was brilliant, you know, especially for me seeing it, because in a way I had to go through it more on my own, though with my friends, family and the Foundation, but I think it’s brilliant that there’s a group of people who are all in the same boat looking for justice, and until April this year I was on my own, so yeah, it’s been mental”

Legal support

Starting legal proceedings, criminal proceedings, is not something everyone is familiar with, or something everyone finds they need to do. It is normal that, faced with a situation like this, we do not know how the institutions work, or do not know what some terms in common use among people who work in the justice system mean.

For people who have been victims of sexual abuse, which is a crime, starting legal proceedings can be part of their path towards healing, towards reparation. For this reason, because of the need such a step involves and how complex it is, the Fundación para la Confianza designed a model to advise, guide and accompany people who have started or wish to begin legal proceedings. This model consists of a team of lawyers and other professionals who help guide people towards the best option for accompanying their process of recovery and reparation.

Cecilia*

* The names in this testimony have been changed to protect the people involved.

There are many ways in which DNA, and the structure of chromosomes, express their information outwardly: through the colour of our eyes; of our hair; some attitudes; ways of acting; or ways of relating to the world. Some people, it is true, never learn the details of their genetic information, but for others it becomes so relevant and has such an influence that, in some cases, it shapes their life.

For Nicolás, it had a great influence.

When he turned four, his mother Cecilia was told that her son had been born with a syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. “He’s missing an allele, a little piece of chromosome, so he’s missing genetic information. For him that has meant motor problems and language disorders, and when he was born he had heart problems and recurrent bronchial syndrome. Because of this he needed to be hospitalised during his first two years of life. After that he didn’t need any medication, until we noticed he was somewhat anxious, and his psychiatrist had to start medicating him”, Cecilia explains.

This genetic condition had an influence not only because of what might be noticeable at first sight, but because his capacity for language and his ways of relating to and bonding with others were, in part, affected by the syndrome. This has meant, for example, that Nicolás is a boy “who doesn’t mince his words, who doesn’t keep what he thinks to himself. There are words he finds harder to pronounce, it’s obvious he finds it hard to communicate, and he also has little social filter, and that has got him into a few conflicts”, his mother explains.

In certain situations, however, this trait helped Nicolás to express facts that, for the great majority, are very hard to put into words.

When Nicolás was twelve, he was a victim of abuse by his uncle in his own home. A year later, three days before his thirteenth birthday, he disclosed it. That was also when they noticed he was more anxious, and he had to start taking medication.

“It was terrible, obviously, but it reassures me to know that Nicolás was able to speak so quickly, less than a year later. His testimony was a bit confused, but he spoke, and yes, I absolutely think that’s why he disclosed it, because of how little filter he has, that side of him worked in his favour”.

Although his frankness was beneficial at first, it would later start to cause problems.

Cecilia did not wait, and she reported it. Although at first the investigation moved forward normally, it later stalled. There was a change of prosecutor, and for Cecilia that was the beginning of more than a year of waiting, of insisting at the courts, of not feeling heard, of feeling that the case was not moving forward, and of finding herself very alone and with little support.

“A year had already gone by since I made the report, and honestly there was no progress. For me it was really important to keep going, not to let it drop, because I constantly had a sense of impunity, and I couldn’t just stay with that feeling, so I was always looking for ways to keep the legal process going, but nothing worked”.

“I felt, and I also knew, that because of Nicolás’s disability there were constant attempts to discredit his testimony, when in spite of everything it was pretty clear. A bit confused about dates but, all things considered, he set out very clearly what happened to him”.

And the waiting was, in the end, what made the discouragement and the sense of impunity grow even more.

More than a year had already passed, and as this feeling grew in Cecilia, she remembered the Foundation.

Cecilia is a family counsellor and has worked on urban regeneration, with families from disadvantaged areas of Santiago. Part of her job is constantly assessing whether or not people can be beneficiaries of programmes, or whether or not they are eligible for certain benefits.

The first time she was told about the Foundation was just when she began taking the case through the courts and, unfortunately, she thought about it as she would at work. “I had doubts, I didn’t know whether they could see me, whether we were the people they were for, because, how silly of me, I thought that since my husband and I had stable jobs, we wouldn’t be the target group because you already have certain networks. For a long time I didn’t dare go, for fear they wouldn’t help me, until one day I decided to do it because I felt I needed support. I’d already been to the Public Prosecutor’s Office many times, I’d had very bad experiences, and I was very discouraged, because I couldn’t see any progress, and I went to the Foundation, even thinking they’d say no to me, but I went”.

As soon as she arrived she realised she had been wrong. “It was incredible from the start. From the moment I walked into the office I felt really welcomed. Things happened that I hadn’t expected, and that visit ended with the Foundation’s lawyer offering to take on Nicolás’s case. For the first time I felt that someone was putting themselves in my shoes, and that’s why I came away very hopeful”.

After that first experience she understood that she was in a different place and, above all, in the right place, the best space she could have come to. “You could really tell they cared about this not going unpunished, which at the Public Prosecutor’s Office had been completely different. I didn’t feel it was a formality, I didn’t feel it was just another case, I genuinely felt enormously reassured, and I kept saying, gosh, why didn’t I come before, why did I take so long to come”, Cecilia recalls, laughing.

“What I expected, and wished for, was for this man to go to prison. Well, later I started to understand that it wasn’t going to be possible. But I wanted this not to be forgotten”, she reflects.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office had, up to that point, offered her an abbreviated trial (juicio abreviado), and Cecilia had never liked that idea. At the Foundation, they explained that it was in fact the best option, because that way Nicolás would not have to testify, “and I sort of used that to resign myself, and to understand that you can keep moving forward, but the main thing was not to expose my son”.

“I think it was thanks to the Foundation that this moved forward, and moved forward quickly. I got in touch with the Foundation, and some time later we managed to get a date for the hearing at which charges were formally brought. There, too, I felt really safe and supported by the lawyer. He was always very attentive, and yes, it absolutely sped this up, and I think in the end what was achieved was achieved thanks to the Foundation’s work, because if I had carried on alone with the prosecutor, it probably wouldn’t have moved forward much”.

When she gave this testimony, a week had passed since the abbreviated trial hearing at which the person who abused Nicolás was convicted. And Cecilia did not need to explain how she felt: her smile and her tone of voice made it clear even through the screen.

“What happened in the end was that he was given five years of intensive supervised release, a restraining order and a ban on contacting us. It will stay as an entry on his criminal record, which involves a lifetime ban on working with children and, lastly, he will never again be able to exercise his right to vote, which for me was one of the most impressive rulings, and it greatly relieved the sense of justice I needed”, Cecilia recalls.

“Even so, sometimes I think and say: ‘gosh, why didn’t he go to prison’, but at the same time I’m satisfied because all these measures give ground and support to Nicolás’s accusation, because it is recognised that it happened, and all the arguments that tried to discredit my son because of his disability ended up not being enough to invalidate his testimony”.

In the end, although for the justice system (not for us) Nicolás’s syndrome was treated as a difficulty, it helped him to set things in motion. Believing and trusting people, whatever their condition, will always be the best support for victims, and a powerful weapon against abuse.

“They believed him, they validated him, and that left me very reassured, proud and happy”.

Psychological guidance

Sexual abuse is complex. From the abusive dynamics that lead to abuse to its consequences, these are aspects as diverse as they are decisive in the process of each person who is a victim. Disclosing, moreover, is a process that takes many people years, among other reasons because of social stigma and because of the loneliness and lack of understanding about abuse that exist in society. That is why the Fundación para la Confianza has a team of professionals who accompany victims in this process of disclosure, and of beginning processes of recovery and reparation, in order, together with them, to design the most appropriate way forward towards the healing of the person who was a victim. And no two cases are alike.

Wilson

On the day Wilson Vial was due to give his testimony for this book, he had to cancel.

“Sorry for not letting you know sooner, I had a police procedure”, he wrote. After the initial concern, he explained that it was a situation at work, “a circular number five”, as he describes it.

What is that? Basically, a more direct intervention: Wilson is a social worker at an Office for the Protection of Children’s Rights (Oficina de Protección de Derechos de Infancia, OPD) in the north of Chile, and a case that had come in required him and his team to make a report in person and have the injuries of a victim of serious physical abuse documented.

“Yes, it’s hard and intense. Unfortunately it’s very common, but well, someone has to do it and be there for them when they need it”, Wilson explains, talking about his work and about the children he works with.

His path into the profession began many years earlier, when he studied in Arica, motivated, as he puts it, “by the wish to be an agent of change in society. OK, maybe that sounds arrogant or something, but I really did think it, because I needed to help make visible situations that, when I needed it, weren’t being seen”.

Situations that, in addition to those he can witness every day in his work today, he lived through in his own life.

2018 was a particular year for Wilson. As well as being the year he qualified professionally, it was the year he took the first step towards working on what had happened to him and decided to ask for help to cope with a situation of sexual abuse he experienced during his childhood. He was 26, and it was the first time he felt the courage to do something about it.

That was how, searching on Google, he came across the Fundación para la Confianza. It caught his attention and he wrote an email. He sent it, they replied, and he felt afraid: “there was such a huge social stigma around victims that I really couldn’t carry on, I didn’t reply again, I couldn’t bring myself to. I felt nothing but guilt, guilt about speaking and doing something, so I preferred to do nothing”, he recalls.

A year later, the social movement of October 2019 triggered an inner reaction in him, one so strong that it gave him the courage to write again, but this time to follow through and begin a process.

“That year, as a result of the social uprising (estallido social), when many accounts of abuse started to come out, there also began to be a change in the ways you could express the things you’ve lived through, so that you, as a victim, can understand that what happened wasn’t your fault, but the fault of the person who did it. Hearing that it isn’t your fault that you were a victim, that it is the fault of the mind of the victimiser, was something that, although I knew it, hearing it gave me a security and an empowerment I hadn’t had until then”, Wilson recalls, moved.

“So I really value the feminist movement that made it possible to take in this courage and this shield in order to face this situation”, he explains. He adds that feeling that security made him get back in touch with the Foundation.

“Many times you try to have, or can have, a family support network, but unfortunately that family support network is based, very often, on emotions and feelings, and although it is able to hold you and make you welcome, it stays at that, and doesn’t go further into starting a reparative process, or doesn’t offer guidance so you can gradually close certain cycles. That’s why I wanted to approach the Foundation. I wanted help, and I plucked up the courage, and I wrote to them”, he recalls.

From this contact “I hoped to be able, well, to be a little more consistent. I work in the social sciences, so I’m constantly making suggestions, or constantly intervening with families who have a problem and need some kind of intervention, and in that context I always have to make suggestions to them, so there was this double standard of mine, where, although I always recommend that the people I work with seek guidance, I wasn’t putting it into practice myself. I think that was the key factor in actually doing it: being consistent with what you preach, and putting it into practice”.

Something he was very clear about from the start was that this was not, in essence, therapy, since it consisted of specific guidance that, in most cases, ended in a referral. Although knowing this helped him get an idea of what was going to happen, he never thought it would all be so quick (in less than two weeks he had already had the first session) or that, truly, a single session would mean an important change in him and in the relationship he began to have with his experience of abuse.

“From the very beginning, and despite it being a really traumatic subject that you have to bring when you come to the Foundation, I find they welcomed me in a way that meant I didn’t hold back in my account, and that had never happened to me anywhere. From the start I feel it helped me to begin to close certain things I thought were resolved, but weren’t. I needed to be able to bring these things out in some way, so that welcome was very good”, Wilson recalls of the first conversation he had with the Foundation’s psychologist.

That day, moreover, they booked him a conversation with the Foundation’s lawyer, because although his initial motivation was not to start legal proceedings, he still had doubts and was not sure of his decision.

“I talked with a lawyer who is specialised in the subject, who knows the legal concepts that apply to legal proceedings for that kind of offence, and who exceeded all my expectations”, Wilson recalls. He says that, although he had some notions, things became clearer to him during the conversation. And so he made a decision out of his own conviction: he would not make any report.

“All of us who were victims of sexual abuse are different, and each of us has to go through our processes in the way that makes most sense to us, and in the healthiest way possible. The psychologist made me realise that this process really meant exposing myself a great deal, and that changed a lot the way I thought about what had happened to me and how I approached that episode”, he recalls.

“My parents wanted to report it and start legal proceedings, because obviously, I understand them, they had a very great feeling of revenge, and obviously I had it too at some point, but I realised that the reality was that I was going to have to go through an uncomfortable and unpleasant process, and I preferred to be well”, Wilson explains.

Moreover, because of the time that had passed in his case, from when it happened until he began to start processes, it ended up being time-barred under Chilean law. “That’s also why there wasn’t a very clear-cut way to prove it, the courts are also really biased, and they practically want a video of you being raped to believe you, and I didn’t want to expose myself to not being believed, to being re-victimised”.

“Maybe if I hadn’t had this contact with the Foundation, I would have reported it, and right now I’d have been overexposed to situations I could have avoided, and that’s why I’m really grateful I did it”.

Afterwards, Wilson was referred to a centre in Iquique, and although Wilson’s contact with a psychologist at the centre did happen, the therapeutic process has not yet been able to begin, “because of financial problems beyond my control”, as Wilson explains.

Looking back, he reflects on the importance of the process he went through at the Foundation, which, although it was brief, “allowed me to open up to what had happened to me, and made me realise even more how necessary it is to begin a reparative process”.

“Now, honestly, I feel really light in relation to the burden of what the situation meant, really light, I truly do. Even though I haven’t started the reparative process, for me the time with the Foundation has been really key, even to, I’d dare say, already starting to get over the situation. This burden has been gradually lifted from me and these episodes of flashbacks or things like that have been happening to me less. I no longer break down the way I used to when the subject came up, and that has been able to give me the tools to build up this self-esteem that was diminished, and that needed this push to start working on it properly”, he recalls, with a little emotion.

This whole journey has undoubtedly also helped him so that, in his work, “I’m even more motivated to be able to prevent situations that are very preventable, and I feel that now I can put into practice what perhaps at some point I wanted to happen for me and never did”.

“Today I try to be the professional I needed at some point when I was a kid. I try to be the social worker that I, as a kid, was crying out for and who never appeared, and I feel proud that I’m managing to fulfil that role”.

Línea Libre

Mental health in 2021 is still a taboo in our country. Much progress has been made, and it is talked about more and more, but there is still prejudice against people who go to therapy, and against the problems faced every day by those who are going through a bad time, or who have anxiety, distress, depression or other mental health conditions. That is why Línea Libre (the Foundation’s helpline for children and young people), a free, confidential and remote psychological support service for children and adolescents, is an alternative the Fundación para la Confianza designed to reach people who, to this day, have no opportunity to obtain appropriate care for their mental health, making psychological consultations and guidance easier to access.

Diego

The launch of Línea Libre was a complicated period. Diego Riveros, a psychologist and the coordinator of the service, remembers it very well, because it was very different from what he had expected. He was nervous, he says, because he had never worked on anything similar, and so he was not sure how it would work, or whether anyone would dare to get in touch, and that was one of his first surprises.

At the first meetings to launch the line, they were a small group of professionals, and the chat they were going to use to communicate with people was not yet active. But since they were eventually going to use email, they set it up to carry out the first launch procedures. He remembers perfectly that it was a Friday in mid-2019, and while they were in a training session, they had to go into the email account to look for a document.

“When we went into the email account we realised that, that week, we had received 20 emails in three days, and all from people in crisis, with suicidal ideation, people telling us: ‘I’m going to kill myself’. They all had very similar themes. I remember we were in a meeting with the person who was going to build a platform for the 1515 (a free, nationwide telephone number), and we had to suspend the meeting. We started answering those emails, on a Friday, it was a long weekend, so we had to organise ourselves to take shifts over the weekend, so that there would always be someone on hand. We hadn’t even been at the Foundation a month and we hadn’t even announced yet that we were taking calls, so for me it was a sign of what was going to happen, evidence of the need for these spaces to exist, and that people needed to ask for help”, Diego recalls.

After those first days, Línea Libre has been like a snowball.

The need was so great that, to this day, the number of consultations has only grown. A few weeks after the email episode, the communication channels were already operational, not yet with the number 1515, but with the Línea Libre app and email. Even so, starting work like this was a real challenge.

“I remember the first conversations, and the fear I had. But that’s where it’s important to know the intervention model, to know it well, the framework we have, because there are mistakes and mistakes. For example, I mean the mistakes of when I asked a question that didn’t help, or steered the conversation, or talked too much, and you just have to throw yourself into writing, and let the conversation flow”.

“With the 1515 we got our first call during the social uprising, because in October the short number was activated, and our first conversation was when we were at the peak of the crisis, the week after the 18th. We also had to rush that launch a bit, because we felt we had to offer support at that moment”. That morning alone, the first with the number active, they received more than 20 calls.

• 20emails in three days, all from people in crisis, before it was announced that the line was open
• October 2019the short number 1515 is activated; the first call comes in the week after the 18th
• 20+calls on the first morning with the 1515 active
• Hundredsof people find a safe space in Línea Libre every day, more than a year after it was created

More than a year after it was created, the pace has not slowed, and since those first emails were answered, Diego and the team of psychologists have been answering, listening and writing to hundreds of people who, every day, find a safe space in Línea Libre.

And of all they have learned, accompanied and worked on through the line, there is one thing that makes the effort worthwhile, and it is a phrase often heard at the end of conversations: ‘Thank you for listening to me’, is very often how our sessions end, and for us it means a great deal because it is the effect of good-quality psychological care, and the sign of an enormous need for support, in situations in which people have not found the possibility of being heard, and in which harmful situations or conflicts come up that have found no other outlet”.

The accounts vary, but many speak to us of suffering, a sense of loneliness and hopelessness. In other cases, though, as Diego explains, “the contact is direct and abrupt, as if they were letting out a message they had been keeping for a long time and had not found the space to say. And in certain calls it is silence that takes a dominant place, becoming the backdrop to what we are about to hear: I can’t take it any more”.

“Words seem to turn into alarms, warning signals that set off a loud noise that can prevent us from hearing what really matters. We are tempted to act as quickly as possible and go to the aid of the person calling us, since we must intervene to safeguard and protect in situations of risk”.

That is why one of the difficulties of working on a front-line psychological support service is to stay calm and try to create the conditions needed for the conversation to become a space of intimacy. For this reason, Diego is sure that “the certainty of our work rests on the search for respectful interventions, which take into account the views of the people who reach out, and in which, most of the time, acting with prudence and respecting the other person’s pace creates a protective environment”.

With this experience, he has realised that creating spaces in which children and young people feel comfortable, talking calmly about what they feel, is possible, and very effective. And what is needed to bring about this encounter? Time. “To listen to other people we need time. To think together and give importance to what they are telling us, it is essential to perceive the other person in their specificity, in their singular ways of expressing and developing discursive productions that speak to us of their personal history”.

To listen to other people we need time.

“When I started working at Línea Libre, in one of my first training sessions, we discussed that one of the challenges of remote care is the premise that each contact is unique, since we will never know whether we will have the opportunity of another conversation. However, to the extent that we are able to maintain a way of working with the characteristics described so far, we manage to weaken this premise and gain the possibility of a new encounter in order to activate protocols and/or appropriate referrals”.

“Thank you for listening to me”, therefore, represents all of that, because it is in this saying that the people who contact the line can take ownership of an account that belongs to them. “Their history and memory are an inescapable part of this discourse, in which it meets the encounter with someone on the other side who is willing to listen”.

And in the end, that is what gives meaning, body and consistency to the work done every day at Línea Libre.

“To listen to and think about human suffering, it is necessary to carry out work characterised by the conviction of seeking new possibilities for each person who calls, and of finding different meanings in their words. From this moment we can achieve the subjective impact of our encounter, in which “Thank you for listening to us” takes on the full force of its meaning”.