Telefon Pa Hubentud
Fundacion Telefon pa Hubentud Aruba
The Aruban Youth Telephone Line, Telefon Pa Hubentud, was launched on November 20, 1999, as an independent charity, with its distinctive telephone number’131′ and logo, aimed at children and youngsters from 8-24 years old and provides its service from 14.00 hours to 18.00 hours, 365 days a year.
The plans for a telephone line in Aruba had been around for some time, by private organisations as well as within the Policy of the Minister of Social Affairs. In 1999 a small group came together and decided to carry out the project of setting up Telefon Pa Hubentud based on information gathered especially from the youth Helplines of Holland who are in existence for over 20 years and the Curacao Telephone Helpline that was in existence at that time.
The main difference between these helplines within the Kingdom of the Netherlands is that Telefon Pa Hubentud commenced with the experiment of including teenagers within its volunteer counselors’ group, an experiment that is resulting in success.
Telefon pa Hubentud is also member of the Child Helpline International since 2014. Telefon Pa Hubentud has a cooperation protocol signed with the Aruban Ministries of Telecommunication, Education and social Affairs. Since November 2002, children can call “131” free. Besides using the telephone service to contact Telefon pa Hubentud the children and youngsters can also email us or chat with us through our 131 mobile app.
Telefon Pa Hubentud is a low threshold form of providing assistance to youngsters who at a particular moment are experiencing a problem. Depending of the contents of a conversation, the service of Telefon Pa Hubentud can have the following functions:
– Primary prevention: preventing problems by supporting callers in handling their situation.
– Secondary prevention: Recognizing a threatening problem and supporting the caller in helping find a solution.
– Tertiary prevention: Preventing that a caller should further experience negative results of a problem. Often this may result in referring to specialized treatment.
It is clear that the telephone, email and chats the way is that children could directly ask for help, when no other child protection agency seems approachable to them.
Besides telephone, email and chat counseling, Telefon Pa Hubentud also has an ” indicator’s function” with regard to the problem causing factors that lie behind social problems of children and youngsters and to develop and stimulate projects and programs that are aimed at preventing and handling these problems. For this indicator and policy function Telefon Pa Hubentud maintains as target group: Society in its entirety.
