The Brenda Volunteers

A Samaritans instructional manual from the 1970 predicts the future

Twitter user Rachel Bosenterfer yesterday shared this extraordinary piece from The Welcome Collection, which is archived here. I have a feeling it’ll be taken down as soon as its publishers are reminded that it exists.

In the 1970s, the Samaritans faced a challenge with obscene callers. To address the issue, founder Chad Varah implemented a system known as the Brenda system, its name derived from the Brent Branch where certain volunteers were trained to handle these types of calls. The system encouraged volunteers to help callers with masturbation if necessary and to try and use the encounter to encourage the caller to get help. This approach fell out of favour and was later replaced by the M System, and placed greater emphasis on the well-being of the victim, rather than the obscene caller.

Now, here’s why I think this post will be removed.

The Brenda system categorized obscene callers based on their motivations and included horny adolescent boys, men who were frightened of women, men who were angry at their mothers, actual psychopaths, and “fetishists and transvestites”.

Now, isn’t that interesting? Not the fact that there is a low-level sociopathic sexual drive shared by so many men that the Samaritans had to develop two separate systems to deal with all of them, but that this same population of males now hold such power that we are ALL of us forced to listen to their insulting, masturbatory shit.

The same ethos of compassionate care for horny dudes, has transformed society.

We are all expected to be Brenda Volunteers now.