Crisis Lines Cranky Over Phony Calls

Every day, Los Angeles counselors deal with crank callers--people who dial crisis lines as if they were free 900-fantasy numbers.

“It’s disturbing,” says Linda Shestock, executive director of Project Sister Sexual Assault Crisis and Prevention Services in Pomona, an organization that regularly receives such calls. “Rape is an act of power and control. Sometimes people use the phone to act out that behavior.”

While all crisis counselors experience the problem, rape hotlines are especially hard hit. And with funding cutbacks reducing the number of lines available to those in need, organizations that continue to operate are seeing an increase in cranks.

Crisis-line counselors face a complex decision in determining whether a call is authentic: play along and adopt a wait-and-see attitude, or risk alienating the caller and trivializing his or her situation through confrontation.

In a job requiring compassion, counselors are often frustrated after listening to a person’s story, then realizing it’s a hoax. For volunteer counselors, many of whom were once victims themselves, it is especially cruel.

Both men and women abuse the lines in this way, but, Shestock says, it is primarily men who crank call Project Sister, speaking in falsetto in an effort to sound female.

Though all crank calls differ, patterns--such as sexual explicitness--emerge, says Andrea Thompson Adam, direct services volunteer coordinator for the metro office of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women.

“For those who are trying to masturbate while talking to a counselor, what they usually do--instead of trying to entice counselors to talk dirty to them--is utilize a detailed scenario of sexual assault,” she says.

This is a flag for counselors since the majority of legitimate callers to crisis lines need to be drawn out to tell their stories.

Crank callers, on the other hand, are long-winded and sexually graphic.

There is a difference between prank calls, which are isolated incidents happening only once, and crank calls, which occur repeatedly and are often placed to the same person.

The Jerky Boys and a whole host of underground phone pranksters have become popular making one-time, isolated prank calls that are humorous and subsequently harmless.

Prank callers are usually adolescents; crank callers, however, are most often adults.

Most crisis lines maintain a list of chronic callers, identifying them by voice, the stories they commonly use and when they have called.

People who have a genuine reason to call crisis lines, says Shestock, are deeply troubled.

So are crank callers, only they don’t feel their own problems are worth exploring, so they invent other lives and other problems for the thrill of being helped.

Crank callers typically suffer from low self-esteem and often invent alternative personas and names, not so much to deceive others but to protect themselves.

Making crank calls is a misdemeanor under California law and is punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and/or up to one year in jail. But crank callers are difficult to bring to trial.