Mr. John Church:

I will respond first. The short answer is that there is no research to prove that correlation. However, as I said earlier, we take many calls every day. It is 1.05 p.m. now and Childline has probably received over 500 calls today. I am only three months in the job so I am new to this and much of my time was spent listening and shadowing some of the calls. I only relayed one case example today but there are hundreds. What we are seeing, as well as from talking to the volunteers online, are behaviours that are causing significant issues for the child. As the Deputy described, they are subtle things such as exclusion by not being invited to a party or not being part of a WhatsApp group, which in effect is bullying. I mentioned earlier that we will have to start considering how we should categorise those calls. If a child mentions in a confidential call that he or she is subject to online bullying, that is categorised as online bullying but far more conversations we are having with children every day are about issues they are having relating to online issues. We would certainly love to see far more research around that and whether it is a correlation. Intuitively, I would agree with the Deputy but there is no research that I know of to show that.

I also mentioned that we are seeing a slight decrease in telephone calls. Incidentally, it is young boys who are calling online, which is interesting. One would tend to think it would be girls calling because they are sometimes better at conversing, but the boys appear to find the online calls a great source of support. We are seeing a switch from calls to online chat and this has forced us to upgrade our online platform, which we are launching next week. With the launch of that platform we can get into many more in-depth conversations and that is when we will start gathering a great deal of research around this.