Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1974
Toward Analysis of the Relations Among the Youth Counterculture, Telephone Hotlines, and Anonymity Michael Baizennan ~
Received July 3, 19 74
During the 1960s, there emerged a youth culture which had two major orientations: the Counterculture and the Movement. We are well hTformed about this youth culture, its social values, social norms, and emergent social roles {e.g., "hippie, " "freak, " "radical," "dropout"). Part o f these social and political movements was the creation o f "alternative," "counterculture," or "radical" human service programs. Early examples were free medical clinics, drop-& centers, and telephone hotlines. Among the actual differences in these programs compared to oMer, "established" human service agencies was {is) the prominent position o f the social value o f client anonymity. This notion o f client anonymity is examined h7 the attempt to understand its role in the relations among themes o f the Counterculture, individual youth, their peers, and youthserving agencies.
COUNTERCULTURE YOUTH AGENCIES During the 1960s in the United States, there emerged innovative human service programs for youth (e.g., Roszak, 1969; Flacks, 1971; Kirby, 1971). These programs were o f several kinds and included information-giving telephone switchboards, telephone hotlines for youth in and with trouble(s), runaway houses where young people who left home could find shelter and counseling, aResearch Consultant, Center for Youth Development, and Research and Assistant Professor in Maternal and Child Health, Department of Public Health, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. Holds degrees in social work and public health and is currently completing a report of a national survey of hotlines and youth crisis programs and working with others in editing papers for a monograph from a conference on evaluating hotlines. The survey data will appear in that publication. 293 9 Plenum Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n , 2 2 7 West 1 7 t h Street, New Y o r k , N . Y . 1 0 0 1 1 . No part o f this p u b l i c a t i o n may be r e p r o d u c e d , stored in a retrieval s y s t e m , or t r a n s m i t t e d , in any f o r m or by a n y means, e l e c t r o n i c , mechanical, p h o t o c o p y i n g , m i c r o f i l m i n g , recording, or o t h e r w i s e , w i t h o u t w r i t t e n permission o f t h e publisher.
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drop-in centers for those who wanted or needed to talk or "rap," general medical and obstetrical-gynecological services for medical and health care, as well as group homes for preadjudicated and adjudicated delinquent youth. Many programs or agencies included elements (or sets of "services") from more than one kind o f program. For example, it was not uncommon to find a youth crisis center with an information and counseling hotline. Some of these programs had a specific target group defined by age (youth), problem (drugs), geographic unit (rural county), functional group (college students), type o f service (counseling), or a similar criterion, but many programs seemed to stand ready to all who chose to use them. Compared to the then existing human service programs, these services appeared to be innovative in several ways. Often, there were no (or very few) paid staff and many staff volunteers; many of the staff were young, "uncredentialed" (i.e., without advanced formal education and degrees), and not "trained" specifically for work with people; the programs were organized not as formal organizations with many horizontal and vertical levels but as horizontal organizations o f peers. Some programs were called "collectives" or "communes," reflecting in name and organizational form the members' sociopolitical beliefs. A major emphasis was placed on the "client's" anonymity; last names were rarely asked for and more rarely written on a record. This was in contrast to the practice in the established agencies, where noane was only part of the information about a person which was required before he could receive service (e.g., parents' names, home address, and social security number). "Intake" in the new agencies was a "minor hassle" at most; it was not a major social status change, a lqte de passage from person to "client," as it was in the established agencies. These new programs seem to appear in full form almost overnight; often they disappeared quickly, too. Emergence was facilitated by low cost (e.g., only a phone was needed), the relatively low degree of bureaucratization, the "service ethos" which supported youth to volunteer as staff, and the number of youth who did so.
TELEPHONE HOTLINES A hotline is a telephone service program in which a caller initiates the process by calling and requesting information, counseling, a chance to "rap," or the like. "Hotline" denotes both a social agency with only a telephone service and the telephone service within a social agency. By 1972, there were more than 600 known youth-oriented hotlines (National Directory, 1972; Hedin, 1972). Hotlines offer immediate, private, no-cost personal service.
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The ubiquity of telephones in this country, their everyday use in our lives, and hence our knowledge of and familiarity with them likely all contributed to their use as a medium of human service work and to the creation of hotlines. Other contributing factors were the low cost of setting up a telephone-centered service, the ease and speed of creating such agencies, the lack of "bureaucracy" in order to sustain the program (staff, physical facility, equipment, and the like), and, particularly important to the youth culture in the 1960s, the immediacy, low cost, privacy, and anonymity of using telephonic conversation. The idea of a telephone hotline can be traced in part to the creation of such a link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Other antecedents of the hotline include radio talk shows and, in the human services, suicide prevention programs, community mental health centers, and community information and referral programs. The programs created as part of these human service movements use the telephone as a hotline, and this hotline is often central to their very program. It is used in "case finding," in "treatment," in "referral," and in "follow-up" for "continuity of care." Telephone hotlines were developed in the 1960s as a human service for adults and youth with personal and situational problems and crises. During the later 1960s, hotlines came to mean youth-oriented and youth-run programs which were part of an alternate strategy for personal and social change (Clark and Jaffe, 1973) and part of the Counterculture; they were a social location of help (Sacks, 1972).
TOWARD A SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF HOTLINES We have looked briefly at the stated purposes of the hotlines. Here, focus is on the objective consequences, manifest and latent, of these programs (Merton, 1957); attention is directed to the organizational form, to the practices, and to the ideology of these programs. Diffusing the Counterculture and the Movement: Building "Community" Hotlines were created in almost every state and large city in the United States (National l~'recto~, 1972). Hence youth in different places in the country and those "on the road" could find "brothers" by finding a hotline, crisis center, "crash pad," or similar youth-oriented and youth-run agency. This actual distribution of programs had the social consequence of diffusing the Counterculture and the Movement, and the new life styles and morality
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within each (Rogers, 1962). As part of the great sociocultural change of the 1960s in the youth culture, there emerged new social roles made up of new language, new acceptable behavior, a new value nexus and morality. Youth who wanted to try being a part of this movement and culture, to take the risk of experimenting with dress styles, drugs, sexual behavior, and the like, could do so with the knowledge that they could check themselves out or get help at a hotline. The ability to find instantly others like oneself and, if needed, "help" likely supported the geographic mobility of y o u t h - both those "just traveling" and those resettling. One could find almost instant camaraderie, almost instant social integration, almost instant Community, in that most important metaphor of youth in the 1960s. Hotlines, then, may be seen as serving three latent social functions in relation to these youth: the validation of the notion of experimenting, the sanctioning or not of a particular behavior or act and hence marking the boundaries between acceptable and deviant social role behavior, and the integration of populations of youth into the emerging Counterculture style and into specific Counterculture groups. The personal consequences for youth of these social functions are examined below.
Organizational Structure and Style Those who began and worked in hotlines and other youth-oriented and youth-run social agencies intended to offer a service congruent with the culture of the Counterculture and the Movement (e.g., Clark and Jaffe, 1973). Part of the ideology of the culture was, according to Berger et al. (1973), rejection of the notion of "componentiality" -- the chopping-up of things, people, and ideas. Formal, bureaucratic-type human service agencies divided people up and treated only parts and pieces of them - not "the whole person." This style was rejected. Another common theme in the Counterculture was an ahistorical orientation coupled with an emphasis on the present. Also, there was the Counterculture orientation against formal expertise from education and training. Emphases were on the values of "doing your own thing" regardless of education and on "selfhelp" - for .oneself, in community work, in social and in political action. 2 Several of these themes found expression in the hotlines. Hotlines often had the simplest structure - a person at a telephone in a room. The listener or "operator" frequently had only hotline-sponsored training. The counseling orientation was directed at the situational problem or crisis; little attempt was made to look for sources of the problem in the caller's background. This was an anti-Freudian, i.e., an anti-formal psychiatric, style of helping; it was an ahistori2Clearly, there were other themes, too (e.g., Roszak, 1969).
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cal approach. 3 Since medical and mental health services were housed in formal agencies with rules o f client eligibility and the like, the hotline in its orientation, form, and procedure was anti-formalistic, anti-"establishment." There were no "waiting lists" at a hotline. The hotline helping philosophy in its organizational form and practices was a very different service than that available from an established human service agency. This incorporation o f themes from the Counterculture and the Movement had consequences for the hotlines, youth, and the human service system.
Some Consequences Evaheation
One consequence of the incorporation o f these themes and the social norm of anonymity was that the hotlines could not be evaluated or assessed using traditional criteria, values, and research methodologies. There were few " h a r d " data, and the available data on clients were anonymous. Hence client outcome was very difficult to study (Jones et al., 1973). In consequence, many attempts at such study became goal displacements in that the process of helping was studied rather than the outcome of helping. Further, hotlines retained control over the criteria used to judge their program as an effective human service; that is, there was a movement toward self-evident self-validation as a "needed, good, and effective" service. This served somewhat to protect the hotlines from critics in the older agencies. Coexistence
Another consequence o f the differences between the hotlines and the other human service agencies was that both kinds o f services could survive in a local area at the same time. The older, established agencies were not directly attacked and likely were not directly pressured to change; the human service system was enlarged, but the internal dynamics remained essentially the same. Given the presence o f both types o f services in a community, the hotlines very often referred callers to the established agencies for longer-term care than they offered and for services which could not be given by talking on a telephone (e.g., birth control pills). This very process o f information giving and referral had three consequences: 3These elements of the hotline orientation to diagnosis and counseling are antithetical to the logic of the medical model with its structure of a nosology built on probabilities of class membership, pathogenicity, and therapy (see, e.g., Taber et al., 1969; Baizerman and Ellison, 1971).
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Taken together, these three consequences contributed to the institutionalization of the hotlines into the human services system. This process is examined next.
Agency Integration As hotline operators became interested in referrals to other agencies, it is likely that they came to want these referrals "to take" -- to be effective. Effective referrals were in part the result of knowing someone at the other agency, knowing the intake criteria there, and/or having a "contract" with other agencies so that your referral would be given other than routine intake and care. The more referral became important to the task of the hotline and to the operator (e.g., "'psychic remuneration"), the more likely it was that the operator would key to the intake criteria of the referral agency. The process of referral was an indicator of agency interaction and exchange, and, in turn, an indicator of program integration into the larger, proximate human service system. The very process of referral, then, brought the Counterculture agency closer to established agencies.
Client Control The latent social function of this referral process was that the established agencies gained entry to Counterculture youth, while not having to change (radically) their own style, form, and substance. By use of a social control or social regulation perspective (Cumming, 1968), Counterculture youth were brought into the social regulatory system; that is, they were "integrated." This resulted in a form of "social control" of the deviant youth subculture.
Organizational Strain Referral and information taken together were one of two orientations in the hotlines; the other was counseling and "rapping." Given the hotline ideology of horizontal organization with minimal task division between staff, these two
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orientations were often in conflict. This conflict was seen as strain on the level of the hotline operator and in the social norms of the organization. The orientation to "people-processing" (Hasenfeld, 1972)stressed immediate (1-3 rain) information giving and referral, while the orientation to "people-changing" (I_el'ton and Rosengren, 1970) stressed longer (5-15 rain) counseling and "rapping." Each operator was expected to be able to handle any type o f call, whenever it came. The social role of the operator, then, was composed o f social expectations o f performance deriving from two rather different service orientations. Each operator had to decide how long to stay on the line, how much to probe a caller, when to make a referral to a local agency for longer-term service and the like. It is likely that volunteer operator turnover was partly a consequence of this strain. Another likely consequence was that task division between operators did in fact emerge even though organizational ideology did not support this. On the organizational level, the two orientations were expressed in social norms about "intake criteria," the definition o f "real" and "'crank" calls, the length o f an ideal call, and the like. Decisions had to be made about whether to publicize the hotline as a fact-giving, counseling, or combined service, a service oriented to youth only or to the larger "community." In the everyday world of the hotline, these issues were interrelated. For example, "intake" is examined briefly. If the hotline publicized itself as offering both information and counseling to all in the community, the only intake to the hotline was a telephone call, the only "waiting list" a busy signal. This busy tone "regulated" intake. When the dominant orientation was to counseling and the hotline so publicized itself, fewer calls could be received during a given time period because each call lasted longer. Also, the target population for the service would change to those who wanted or needed counseling or "rapping." There were other, less obvious regulators o f intake. Operators who handled counseling calls only (or predominantly) came to want and were thought to need (by hotline advisory board members, the local professional community, and others) training in "handling" such calls. This led to training programs conducted most often by professionals in psychology, psychiatry, and the like. Such training enhanced the established agencies' view o f the hotlines ("organizational prestige"), redefined the operator's social role, and led to organizational norms of volunteer operator recruitment, screening, training sessions, supervision, and the like. In turn, training led to new notions of which calls could be best handled and how. This, in its turn, related to intake as all callers were listened to from the perspective o f the problems which the operators were comfortable and knowledgeable to handle. In short, many hotlines became bureaucratized as they became older and as they sought to work with other human service agencies. The hotline remained a viable, meaningful, and important service, but one somewhat different than it
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was originally. It b e c a m e an o r g a n i z a t i o n - i n - a c t i o n s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t f r o m t h e p i c t u r e s o f it in t h e h o t l i n e ideology. T h e h o t l i n e c a m e to resemble in some ways t h e e s t a b l i s h e d h u m a n service agencies; t h e social m o v e m e n t a n d the services were i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d . ANONYMITY The b e g i n n i n g social analysis has a t t e m p t e d to i n t e r w e a v e t h e t h e m e s o f the y o u t h C o u n t e r c u l t u r e w i t h the f o r m , style, and s u b s t a n c e o f the h o t l i n e s , and t h e n t o e x a m i n e these p r o g r a m s in r e l a t i o n to o t h e r h u m a n service agencies. Now, t h e n o t i o n o f a n o n y m i t y will be c o n s i d e r e d . It is e x a m i n e d as a social value a n d as a social n o r m in h u m a n service w o r k in general and in h o t l i n e s . S o m e p e r s o n a l and social c o n s e q u e n c e s o f this value a n d n o r m are suggested. Last, t h e earlier discussions are b r o u g h t t o g e t h e r a n d a n o n y m i t y is e x a m i n e d in r e l a t i o n to y o u t h a n d to h o t l i n e s . T h e Idea o f A n o n y m i t y What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other nanae would smell as sweet. Shakespeare A n o n y m i t y is a social value a n d social n o r m in hotlines. It is a c u l t u r a l s y m b o l in A m e r i c a o f all t h a t is w r o n g in o u r m o d e r n , u r b a n life. 4 A n o n y m i t y is a s u b t y p e o f " i g n o r a n c e " ( M o o r e a n d T u m i n , 1949). In its most c o m m o n d e f i n i t i o n , it m e a n s " o f u n k n o w n n a m e " , s It c a n be c o n t r a s t e d w i t h " c o n f i d e n t i a l , " w h e r e a n a m e is k n o w n b u t n o t divulged; "privileged c o m m u n i c a t i o n , " a similar n o t i o n w i t h a specific legal m e a n i n g (Black's L a w Dictionary, 4 t h ed., 1 9 5 7 ) ; a n d " p s e u d o n y m , " a false a n d / o r an a s s u m e d n a m e . 6 A n o n y m i t y m e a n s m o r e t h a n " o f u n k n o w n n a m e " . 7 It m e a n s n o t t o k n o w the p e r s o n ; o u r n a m e s and o u r i d e n t i t i e s are i n t e r t w i n e d : " W h o are y o u ? .... I am Mike." 4An advertisement appearing in The New York Review o f Books (November 29, 1973) reads, in part, "Living in anonymity. To live in a city is to live in anonymity. To cope with a city is to cope with strangers. How did it become possible for millions of people to live out their entire lives this way?" s "Clothed in the coat of darkness of an anonymous writer" (1866). There is the suggestion in one quote that to know the author's name is to prejudice the reading of his work. "it were.., wisdome it selfe, to read all Authors as Anonymo's, looking on the Sence, not Names of Books" (1654) (Oxford English Dictionar),, 1928). 6Related words and phrases in everyday and professional language are "ignorance," "secret," "identity," "kept in the dark," and the military "need to know" security clearance. 7Other leads include Kafka's " K " in The Trial; the historical practice of giving new names to Black slaves, American Indians, and immigrants passing through Ellis Island; the social practice of legal name changes; the names which adolescents sometimes "try on"; the notion that "to name something is to make it real"; the notion of the magic, the power, the "medicine" of a name.
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A name is a kind of face whereby one is known. Thomas Fuller As his name is, so is he. I Samuel
In the idea of anonymity is the notion o f not giving, sharing, exchanging information. Information is often a form o f power. The symbol o f anonymity combines the meanings o f unknown, privacy, identity, and power (Edelman, 1971). A n o n y m i t y as a social value and social norm was found in the Counterculture and in the Movement. Anonymity characterized the social relationships at the mass gatherings such as Woodstock; it appeared in the Jesus movement, t o o - - first names only at the former, new names (i.e., a new identity) in the latter. In the Movement, first names or pseudonyms were used to guard against infiltrators, to reduce the chances o f arrest. In this, the Movement had clear historical threads to the union movement and to earlier right- and left-wing radical movements (e.g., Hofstadter, 1965). In the religious-psychic orientation of the Counterculture, there was a theme o f intense personal disclosure, often to a stranger (Simmel, 1950) or to a like-situated other. A n o n y m i t y in this sense is a thread which is found in the Catholic confession (O'Rourke, 1973) and in Alcoholics Anonymous, among other sources, a The social value and social norm o f anonymity were functional for relating themes o f the Counterculture and tlae Movement with specific social expectations o f behavior and with hotlines.
A n o n y m i t y in Hotlines A n o n y m i t y was a social norm and value in hotlines. The "political paranoia" of the Movement (Hoftstadter, 1965) along with the reality o f "getting busted" for talking about using drugs likely contributed to creating and sustaining the social norm o f anonymity. Even though the hotline operators were like the callers, someone else could be listening in; or the place could be broken into and records stolen. Fear o f the police and a magnification o f them as omnipresent and omnipotent were surely elements in the Movement and in the Counterculture. Also contributing to the norm o f anonymity in hotlines was the notion that last names were simply unnecessary. One did not have to know a person's last name in order to give referral information or to "rap." Last name, social security number, and address are important for records, for billing clients, and for follow-up. These were not elements o f h o t l i n e service. Other examples of "intimate" or pseudointimate relationships wherein anonymity is the rule include transient homosexual relationships (Humphreys, 1970), prostitute-client relationships, and maxriage-partner switches, i.e., "swinging" (Transaction/Society, 1972).
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Some Social Functions of Anonymity in Hotlines The social norm and social value of anonymity have been placed within the context of the hotline as a service for youth. Exanlined next are some social functions of hotline anonymity for individual youth and for youth as a population group.
Re: Youth Several theorists of youth discuss the "developmental tasks" of adolescence and the "need to experiment," to test oneself as a means of forming one's "self" (e.g., Erikson, 1971). This trying-out is thought to be difficult for the individual in our culture; it was exceptionally difficult during the 1960sa time of massive sociocultural change. Social roles in the Counterculture were often more emergent than clear and actual (depending on where one lived). The behaviors of a successful role occupant in the culture were new, often frightening, and sometimes potentially dangerous to the self, both psychologically and socially (e.g., arrest). The role of hotlines in relation to these sociocultural changes has been noted. For the individual youth, the issue was different although related.
Support for Experimen ration To experiment, to test, is "to risk" personal and interpersonal security, physical harm, and the like (e.g., Carney,.1971). Risk is probabilistic in that one rarely knows "for sure" what will happen. In one sense, the more atypical or socially deviant or illegal the activity one tries, the greater the social risk (objective social consequences) and, often, the greater the psychological experience of "taking a chance" (subjective personal consequences). Part of experinaenting and risk-taking is the probability of "getting caught," of retribution as in "being made to take responsibility for one's actions." Anonymity reduces the individual's risk of getting caught ("being turned in") and of legal prosecution. Consequently, anonymity in hotlines supports experimentation and risk-taking, basic developmental tasks of maturation, by reducing the chances of retribution (Konopka, 1973).
Reduce Dependency, Retain Autonomy The individual caller does not have to give his nan~e to get help, information, or someone to talk to. He can remain a "person" and not feel like a "client or patient." He does not have to give other "private" information. He cannot be forced to take a referral or be pushed around: he can hang up the phone. He has
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a degree of personal control over his identity and his life space. The young caller has control of his dependency on others. He can retain autonomy.
Participation in DecisioHs About Self The caller can bargain with the operator by managing his "presentation of the sell"' (Goffman, 1959). By this management and with the freedom to hang up the phone and thus "terminate" tile helping relationship, the caller can negotiate the "diagnosis" of his problem and the definition of responsibility in tile therapeutic relationship (e.g., Scheff, 1968). The power distribution between the helper and the one asking for help is changed: anonymity is functional in the distribution of power in interpersonal relations (see, e.g., Jourard on "selfdisclosure," 1971, and Moore and Tumin, 1949) and in the management of "'rejection" (Phillips, 1969). The young caller can bargain with the operator about his "problem." He can participate more fully in decisions which affect him. Reducing dependency on adults, retaining autonomy about his behavior, participating in decisions about self, bargaining with another can all be considered "anticipatory socialization" (Merton, 1957) to the values and social norms of adulthood, the group to which youth aspire, however ambivalently.
Modification o f Client Role Anonymity modifies the traditional human services client role. It is functional in redistributing power between the practitioner (the operator) and the client (the caller). This can be viewed as limiting the incorporation of the client into the agency, i.e., in reducing the agency's social control of individual youth. The traditional client role includes the social expectations of a commitment "to get better" with the help of another and the redefinition of self as problematic. The short-term nature of telephone counseling modifies these expectations of the client role. Anonymity supports these modifications in that the agency has few ways of finding and maintaining prolonged contact with the caller. These changes in client role have resulted in two phenomena: the emergence of a nonhelping caller role, "the crank," and the emergence of a social role which modifies the social norm and social value of anonymity, the "repeater."
Deviant Client Roles The "crank" is a caller who presents content which the particular hotline defines as "not a real problem." A crank call is an illegitimate call. A subtype of crank call is the obscene call. Both these types of calls may be the ones once
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received by private persons and reported by them to the local telephone company. These are now received in large numbers at hotlines. A n o n y m i t y has the latent social function (Merton, 1 9 5 7 ) o f facilitating these types of calls and o f limiting the hotline's ability to prevent or reduce them. A n o n y m i t y again is seen as modifying retribution. The "repeater" is a person who calls the hotline regularly. He becomes a "known person." Thus the repeater modifies the social norm and social value of caller anonymity. Where the crank presents illegitimate content, the repealer is seen by operators usually as a person who is not "really hurting." A subtype o f the repeater is the masturbator. 9 (There may be some overlap in the categories of the obscene call and the masturbation call, both in the actual persons who call and in the content o f the call. This is an empirical question, the answer to which is thought to vary by the culture o f the particular hotline.) The repeater is a deviant caller to the hotline in that he becomes known. From the perspective of anonymity, one might look to the particular callers to learn if these people need or want to make themselves known within the bounds o f anonymity; one could look also to the hotline to see if the operators recruit certain people to the social role o f repeaters so as to develop longer-lasting relationships with some callers. Both deviant caller roles are different than the traditional human service client roles and the new hotline client role. Both are in the social system o f hotlines and seem to be functional for the staff of the hotline. The crank caller is someone the operator can "tell off," while the repeater is someone the operator can have a longer-lasting relationship with. Both roles have a character related to the social norm and social value o f anonymity.
F I N A L NOTE The hotline is a very American invention. From Emily Post on telephone etiquette, we learned how to talk; from the Bell System we were encouraged to talk. Talk we have on the ubiquitous, intrusive telephone. The phone is as instant, as cheap, and as American as instant mashed potatoes. The phone is used with great social utility and worth in the hotlines. Another piece of technology has been harnessed.
REFERENCES Aronson, S. H. (1971). The sociology of the telephone. Internat. J. Comp. Sociol. 12: 153-167. 9There may be some merit in examining tile symbolic meaning of the word "liotline" for tile masturbator.
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Baizerman, M., and Ellison, D. L. (1971). A social role analysis of senility. Gerontologist 11(2): 164-170. Ball, D. W. (1968). Toward a sociology of telephones, in Truzzi, M. (ed.), Sociology and Everj,day Life, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., pp. 59-75. Berger, P. L., Berger, B., and Kellner, H. (1973). Demodernizing consciousness. Social Policy 3(6): 3-10. Black's Law Dictionary, 4th ed. (1957). West Publishing Co., St. Paul, Minn. Brockopp, G. W. (1970). Tile telephone call -- Conversation or therapy and crisis intervention. Crisis bltervention 2(3): 1-4. C~ney, R. E. (ed.) (1971). Risk-Taking Behavior, Thomas, Springfield, 111. Chwast, 1. (1964). The social function of guilt. Social Work 9(2): 58-63. Clark, T., and Jaffe, D. T. (1973). Toward a Radical Therapy: Alternative Services for Personal and Social Change, Gordon and Breach, New York. Crisis Intervention (all issues). Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service, Buffalo, N. Y. Cumming, E. (1968). Systems o f Social Regulation, Atherton, New York. Edelman, M. (1971). Politics as Symbolic Action, Markham, Chicago. Erikson, E. (1971 ). Youth and the life cycle. In Muuss, R. E. (ed.), Adolescent Behavior and Society, Random House, New York, pp. 253-264. Evan, W. (1969). The organization-set. In Thompson, J. D., and Broom, V. H. (eds.), Organizational Design and Research, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, pp. 175-191. Flacks, R. (1971). Youth and Social Change, Markham, Chicago. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York. Hasenfeld, Y. (1972). People-processing organizations: An exchange approach. Am. Sociol. Rev. 37(3): 256-263. Hedin, D. (1972). Hotline operators look at hotlines. Center Quarterly Focus 1(3). Center for Youth Development and Research, University of Minnesota. Hofstadter, R. (1965). The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Knopf, New York. Hotlines for Youth (1972). U.S. DHEW, Youth Development and Delinquency Prevention Program, Publication No. DHEW-SRS 72-26006. Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. Transaction 7(3): 10-25. Jones, C., Dahlke, A. E., and La Charite, N. (1973). Helping Behavior in a Hotline Setting (mimeo, first draft), American Institutes for Research, Kensington, Md., p. 103. Jourard, S. M. (1971). Self-Disclosure, Wiley. New York. Kirby, D. (1971). A counter-culture explanation of student activism. Soc. Problems 19(2): 203-216. Kogan, N., and WaUach, M. A. (1967). Risk taking as a function of the situation, the person and the group. In New Directions in Psychology III, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp. 111-278. Konopka, G. (1973). Requirements for healthy development of adolescent youth. Adolescence 8(31): 291-316. Letton, M., and Rosengren, W. (eds.) (1970). Organizations and Clients, Merrill, Columbus, O. Life, June 23, 1972, pp. 31-39. MacLeod, G. (1967). Confession and absolution. In Mowrer, O. H. (ed.), Morality and Mental Health, Rand McNally, Chicago. Merton, R. K. (1957). Social Theory and Social StnLcture, Free Press, Glencoe, 111. Moore, W. E., and Tumin, M. M. (1949). Some social functions of ignorance. Am. Sociol. Rev. 14(6): 787-795. Natanson, M. (1970). The Journeying Self, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. National Directory o f Hotlines, Switchboards and Related Services (1972). The Exchange, 311 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn. O'Rourke, D. (1973). Models for the confession. Priest 29(2): 46-54.
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Oxford English Dictionary ( 1928). Clarendon, Oxford. Phillips, D. L. (1969). Rejection: A possible consequence of seeking help for mental disorders. In Rusing, W. A. (ed.), Deviant Behavior and Social Process, Rand McNally, Chicago, pp. 394-401. Rogers, E. M. (1962). Diffusion o f Innol,ations, Free Press, New York. Roszak, T. (1969). The Makbzg of a Counter Culture, Doubleday, New York. Sacks, H. (1972). The search for help: No one to turn to. In Slmeidman, E. S. (ed.), Essays in Self-Destruction, Science House, New York, pp. 203-223. Scheff, T. J. (1968). Negotiating re',dity : Notes on power in the assessment of responsibility. Soc. Problems 16(1): 3-17. Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. Am. Anthropologist 70: 1075-1095. Simmel, G. (1950). Tile stranger. In Wolff, K. H. (ed.), Tile Sociology ofGeorg Simmel, Free Press, Glencoe, I11., pp. 402-408. Smith, D. E., Bental, D. J., and Schwartz, J. L. (eds.) (1971). The Free Clinic: A Community Approach to Health Care and Drug Abuse, Stash Press, Beloit, Wis. Taber, M., Quay, It. C., Mark, H., and Ncaley, V. (1969). Disease ideology and mental health research. Soc. Problems 16(3): 349-357. Transaction/Society (special isstie 1972). New life styles for Americans. 9(4).
Toward Analysis of the Relations Among the Youth Counterculture, Telephone Hotlines, and Anonymity Michael Baizennan ~
Received July 3, 19 74
During the 1960s, there emerged a youth culture which had two major orientations: the Counterculture and the Movement. We are well hTformed about this youth culture, its social values, social norms, and emergent social roles {e.g., "hippie, " "freak, " "radical," "dropout"). Part o f these social and political movements was the creation o f "alternative," "counterculture," or "radical" human service programs. Early examples were free medical clinics, drop-& centers, and telephone hotlines. Among the actual differences in these programs compared to oMer, "established" human service agencies was {is) the prominent position o f the social value o f client anonymity. This notion o f client anonymity is examined h7 the attempt to understand its role in the relations among themes o f the Counterculture, individual youth, their peers, and youthserving agencies.
COUNTERCULTURE YOUTH AGENCIES During the 1960s in the United States, there emerged innovative human service programs for youth (e.g., Roszak, 1969; Flacks, 1971; Kirby, 1971). These programs were o f several kinds and included information-giving telephone switchboards, telephone hotlines for youth in and with trouble(s), runaway houses where young people who left home could find shelter and counseling, aResearch Consultant, Center for Youth Development, and Research and Assistant Professor in Maternal and Child Health, Department of Public Health, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. Holds degrees in social work and public health and is currently completing a report of a national survey of hotlines and youth crisis programs and working with others in editing papers for a monograph from a conference on evaluating hotlines. The survey data will appear in that publication. 293 9 Plenum Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n , 2 2 7 West 1 7 t h Street, New Y o r k , N . Y . 1 0 0 1 1 . No part o f this p u b l i c a t i o n may be r e p r o d u c e d , stored in a retrieval s y s t e m , or t r a n s m i t t e d , in any f o r m or by a n y means, e l e c t r o n i c , mechanical, p h o t o c o p y i n g , m i c r o f i l m i n g , recording, or o t h e r w i s e , w i t h o u t w r i t t e n permission o f t h e publisher.
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drop-in centers for those who wanted or needed to talk or "rap," general medical and obstetrical-gynecological services for medical and health care, as well as group homes for preadjudicated and adjudicated delinquent youth. Many programs or agencies included elements (or sets of "services") from more than one kind o f program. For example, it was not uncommon to find a youth crisis center with an information and counseling hotline. Some of these programs had a specific target group defined by age (youth), problem (drugs), geographic unit (rural county), functional group (college students), type o f service (counseling), or a similar criterion, but many programs seemed to stand ready to all who chose to use them. Compared to the then existing human service programs, these services appeared to be innovative in several ways. Often, there were no (or very few) paid staff and many staff volunteers; many of the staff were young, "uncredentialed" (i.e., without advanced formal education and degrees), and not "trained" specifically for work with people; the programs were organized not as formal organizations with many horizontal and vertical levels but as horizontal organizations o f peers. Some programs were called "collectives" or "communes," reflecting in name and organizational form the members' sociopolitical beliefs. A major emphasis was placed on the "client's" anonymity; last names were rarely asked for and more rarely written on a record. This was in contrast to the practice in the established agencies, where noane was only part of the information about a person which was required before he could receive service (e.g., parents' names, home address, and social security number). "Intake" in the new agencies was a "minor hassle" at most; it was not a major social status change, a lqte de passage from person to "client," as it was in the established agencies. These new programs seem to appear in full form almost overnight; often they disappeared quickly, too. Emergence was facilitated by low cost (e.g., only a phone was needed), the relatively low degree of bureaucratization, the "service ethos" which supported youth to volunteer as staff, and the number of youth who did so.
TELEPHONE HOTLINES A hotline is a telephone service program in which a caller initiates the process by calling and requesting information, counseling, a chance to "rap," or the like. "Hotline" denotes both a social agency with only a telephone service and the telephone service within a social agency. By 1972, there were more than 600 known youth-oriented hotlines (National Directory, 1972; Hedin, 1972). Hotlines offer immediate, private, no-cost personal service.
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The ubiquity of telephones in this country, their everyday use in our lives, and hence our knowledge of and familiarity with them likely all contributed to their use as a medium of human service work and to the creation of hotlines. Other contributing factors were the low cost of setting up a telephone-centered service, the ease and speed of creating such agencies, the lack of "bureaucracy" in order to sustain the program (staff, physical facility, equipment, and the like), and, particularly important to the youth culture in the 1960s, the immediacy, low cost, privacy, and anonymity of using telephonic conversation. The idea of a telephone hotline can be traced in part to the creation of such a link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Other antecedents of the hotline include radio talk shows and, in the human services, suicide prevention programs, community mental health centers, and community information and referral programs. The programs created as part of these human service movements use the telephone as a hotline, and this hotline is often central to their very program. It is used in "case finding," in "treatment," in "referral," and in "follow-up" for "continuity of care." Telephone hotlines were developed in the 1960s as a human service for adults and youth with personal and situational problems and crises. During the later 1960s, hotlines came to mean youth-oriented and youth-run programs which were part of an alternate strategy for personal and social change (Clark and Jaffe, 1973) and part of the Counterculture; they were a social location of help (Sacks, 1972).
TOWARD A SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF HOTLINES We have looked briefly at the stated purposes of the hotlines. Here, focus is on the objective consequences, manifest and latent, of these programs (Merton, 1957); attention is directed to the organizational form, to the practices, and to the ideology of these programs. Diffusing the Counterculture and the Movement: Building "Community" Hotlines were created in almost every state and large city in the United States (National l~'recto~, 1972). Hence youth in different places in the country and those "on the road" could find "brothers" by finding a hotline, crisis center, "crash pad," or similar youth-oriented and youth-run agency. This actual distribution of programs had the social consequence of diffusing the Counterculture and the Movement, and the new life styles and morality
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within each (Rogers, 1962). As part of the great sociocultural change of the 1960s in the youth culture, there emerged new social roles made up of new language, new acceptable behavior, a new value nexus and morality. Youth who wanted to try being a part of this movement and culture, to take the risk of experimenting with dress styles, drugs, sexual behavior, and the like, could do so with the knowledge that they could check themselves out or get help at a hotline. The ability to find instantly others like oneself and, if needed, "help" likely supported the geographic mobility of y o u t h - both those "just traveling" and those resettling. One could find almost instant camaraderie, almost instant social integration, almost instant Community, in that most important metaphor of youth in the 1960s. Hotlines, then, may be seen as serving three latent social functions in relation to these youth: the validation of the notion of experimenting, the sanctioning or not of a particular behavior or act and hence marking the boundaries between acceptable and deviant social role behavior, and the integration of populations of youth into the emerging Counterculture style and into specific Counterculture groups. The personal consequences for youth of these social functions are examined below.
Organizational Structure and Style Those who began and worked in hotlines and other youth-oriented and youth-run social agencies intended to offer a service congruent with the culture of the Counterculture and the Movement (e.g., Clark and Jaffe, 1973). Part of the ideology of the culture was, according to Berger et al. (1973), rejection of the notion of "componentiality" -- the chopping-up of things, people, and ideas. Formal, bureaucratic-type human service agencies divided people up and treated only parts and pieces of them - not "the whole person." This style was rejected. Another common theme in the Counterculture was an ahistorical orientation coupled with an emphasis on the present. Also, there was the Counterculture orientation against formal expertise from education and training. Emphases were on the values of "doing your own thing" regardless of education and on "selfhelp" - for .oneself, in community work, in social and in political action. 2 Several of these themes found expression in the hotlines. Hotlines often had the simplest structure - a person at a telephone in a room. The listener or "operator" frequently had only hotline-sponsored training. The counseling orientation was directed at the situational problem or crisis; little attempt was made to look for sources of the problem in the caller's background. This was an anti-Freudian, i.e., an anti-formal psychiatric, style of helping; it was an ahistori2Clearly, there were other themes, too (e.g., Roszak, 1969).
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cal approach. 3 Since medical and mental health services were housed in formal agencies with rules o f client eligibility and the like, the hotline in its orientation, form, and procedure was anti-formalistic, anti-"establishment." There were no "waiting lists" at a hotline. The hotline helping philosophy in its organizational form and practices was a very different service than that available from an established human service agency. This incorporation o f themes from the Counterculture and the Movement had consequences for the hotlines, youth, and the human service system.
Some Consequences Evaheation
One consequence of the incorporation o f these themes and the social norm of anonymity was that the hotlines could not be evaluated or assessed using traditional criteria, values, and research methodologies. There were few " h a r d " data, and the available data on clients were anonymous. Hence client outcome was very difficult to study (Jones et al., 1973). In consequence, many attempts at such study became goal displacements in that the process of helping was studied rather than the outcome of helping. Further, hotlines retained control over the criteria used to judge their program as an effective human service; that is, there was a movement toward self-evident self-validation as a "needed, good, and effective" service. This served somewhat to protect the hotlines from critics in the older agencies. Coexistence
Another consequence o f the differences between the hotlines and the other human service agencies was that both kinds o f services could survive in a local area at the same time. The older, established agencies were not directly attacked and likely were not directly pressured to change; the human service system was enlarged, but the internal dynamics remained essentially the same. Given the presence o f both types o f services in a community, the hotlines very often referred callers to the established agencies for longer-term care than they offered and for services which could not be given by talking on a telephone (e.g., birth control pills). This very process o f information giving and referral had three consequences: 3These elements of the hotline orientation to diagnosis and counseling are antithetical to the logic of the medical model with its structure of a nosology built on probabilities of class membership, pathogenicity, and therapy (see, e.g., Taber et al., 1969; Baizerman and Ellison, 1971).
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Taken together, these three consequences contributed to the institutionalization of the hotlines into the human services system. This process is examined next.
Agency Integration As hotline operators became interested in referrals to other agencies, it is likely that they came to want these referrals "to take" -- to be effective. Effective referrals were in part the result of knowing someone at the other agency, knowing the intake criteria there, and/or having a "contract" with other agencies so that your referral would be given other than routine intake and care. The more referral became important to the task of the hotline and to the operator (e.g., "'psychic remuneration"), the more likely it was that the operator would key to the intake criteria of the referral agency. The process of referral was an indicator of agency interaction and exchange, and, in turn, an indicator of program integration into the larger, proximate human service system. The very process of referral, then, brought the Counterculture agency closer to established agencies.
Client Control The latent social function of this referral process was that the established agencies gained entry to Counterculture youth, while not having to change (radically) their own style, form, and substance. By use of a social control or social regulation perspective (Cumming, 1968), Counterculture youth were brought into the social regulatory system; that is, they were "integrated." This resulted in a form of "social control" of the deviant youth subculture.
Organizational Strain Referral and information taken together were one of two orientations in the hotlines; the other was counseling and "rapping." Given the hotline ideology of horizontal organization with minimal task division between staff, these two
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orientations were often in conflict. This conflict was seen as strain on the level of the hotline operator and in the social norms of the organization. The orientation to "people-processing" (Hasenfeld, 1972)stressed immediate (1-3 rain) information giving and referral, while the orientation to "people-changing" (I_el'ton and Rosengren, 1970) stressed longer (5-15 rain) counseling and "rapping." Each operator was expected to be able to handle any type o f call, whenever it came. The social role of the operator, then, was composed o f social expectations o f performance deriving from two rather different service orientations. Each operator had to decide how long to stay on the line, how much to probe a caller, when to make a referral to a local agency for longer-term service and the like. It is likely that volunteer operator turnover was partly a consequence of this strain. Another likely consequence was that task division between operators did in fact emerge even though organizational ideology did not support this. On the organizational level, the two orientations were expressed in social norms about "intake criteria," the definition o f "real" and "'crank" calls, the length o f an ideal call, and the like. Decisions had to be made about whether to publicize the hotline as a fact-giving, counseling, or combined service, a service oriented to youth only or to the larger "community." In the everyday world of the hotline, these issues were interrelated. For example, "intake" is examined briefly. If the hotline publicized itself as offering both information and counseling to all in the community, the only intake to the hotline was a telephone call, the only "waiting list" a busy signal. This busy tone "regulated" intake. When the dominant orientation was to counseling and the hotline so publicized itself, fewer calls could be received during a given time period because each call lasted longer. Also, the target population for the service would change to those who wanted or needed counseling or "rapping." There were other, less obvious regulators o f intake. Operators who handled counseling calls only (or predominantly) came to want and were thought to need (by hotline advisory board members, the local professional community, and others) training in "handling" such calls. This led to training programs conducted most often by professionals in psychology, psychiatry, and the like. Such training enhanced the established agencies' view o f the hotlines ("organizational prestige"), redefined the operator's social role, and led to organizational norms of volunteer operator recruitment, screening, training sessions, supervision, and the like. In turn, training led to new notions of which calls could be best handled and how. This, in its turn, related to intake as all callers were listened to from the perspective o f the problems which the operators were comfortable and knowledgeable to handle. In short, many hotlines became bureaucratized as they became older and as they sought to work with other human service agencies. The hotline remained a viable, meaningful, and important service, but one somewhat different than it
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was originally. It b e c a m e an o r g a n i z a t i o n - i n - a c t i o n s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t f r o m t h e p i c t u r e s o f it in t h e h o t l i n e ideology. T h e h o t l i n e c a m e to resemble in some ways t h e e s t a b l i s h e d h u m a n service agencies; t h e social m o v e m e n t a n d the services were i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d . ANONYMITY The b e g i n n i n g social analysis has a t t e m p t e d to i n t e r w e a v e t h e t h e m e s o f the y o u t h C o u n t e r c u l t u r e w i t h the f o r m , style, and s u b s t a n c e o f the h o t l i n e s , and t h e n t o e x a m i n e these p r o g r a m s in r e l a t i o n to o t h e r h u m a n service agencies. Now, t h e n o t i o n o f a n o n y m i t y will be c o n s i d e r e d . It is e x a m i n e d as a social value a n d as a social n o r m in h u m a n service w o r k in general and in h o t l i n e s . S o m e p e r s o n a l and social c o n s e q u e n c e s o f this value a n d n o r m are suggested. Last, t h e earlier discussions are b r o u g h t t o g e t h e r a n d a n o n y m i t y is e x a m i n e d in r e l a t i o n to y o u t h a n d to h o t l i n e s . T h e Idea o f A n o n y m i t y What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other nanae would smell as sweet. Shakespeare A n o n y m i t y is a social value a n d social n o r m in hotlines. It is a c u l t u r a l s y m b o l in A m e r i c a o f all t h a t is w r o n g in o u r m o d e r n , u r b a n life. 4 A n o n y m i t y is a s u b t y p e o f " i g n o r a n c e " ( M o o r e a n d T u m i n , 1949). In its most c o m m o n d e f i n i t i o n , it m e a n s " o f u n k n o w n n a m e " , s It c a n be c o n t r a s t e d w i t h " c o n f i d e n t i a l , " w h e r e a n a m e is k n o w n b u t n o t divulged; "privileged c o m m u n i c a t i o n , " a similar n o t i o n w i t h a specific legal m e a n i n g (Black's L a w Dictionary, 4 t h ed., 1 9 5 7 ) ; a n d " p s e u d o n y m , " a false a n d / o r an a s s u m e d n a m e . 6 A n o n y m i t y m e a n s m o r e t h a n " o f u n k n o w n n a m e " . 7 It m e a n s n o t t o k n o w the p e r s o n ; o u r n a m e s and o u r i d e n t i t i e s are i n t e r t w i n e d : " W h o are y o u ? .... I am Mike." 4An advertisement appearing in The New York Review o f Books (November 29, 1973) reads, in part, "Living in anonymity. To live in a city is to live in anonymity. To cope with a city is to cope with strangers. How did it become possible for millions of people to live out their entire lives this way?" s "Clothed in the coat of darkness of an anonymous writer" (1866). There is the suggestion in one quote that to know the author's name is to prejudice the reading of his work. "it were.., wisdome it selfe, to read all Authors as Anonymo's, looking on the Sence, not Names of Books" (1654) (Oxford English Dictionar),, 1928). 6Related words and phrases in everyday and professional language are "ignorance," "secret," "identity," "kept in the dark," and the military "need to know" security clearance. 7Other leads include Kafka's " K " in The Trial; the historical practice of giving new names to Black slaves, American Indians, and immigrants passing through Ellis Island; the social practice of legal name changes; the names which adolescents sometimes "try on"; the notion that "to name something is to make it real"; the notion of the magic, the power, the "medicine" of a name.
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A name is a kind of face whereby one is known. Thomas Fuller As his name is, so is he. I Samuel
In the idea of anonymity is the notion o f not giving, sharing, exchanging information. Information is often a form o f power. The symbol o f anonymity combines the meanings o f unknown, privacy, identity, and power (Edelman, 1971). A n o n y m i t y as a social value and social norm was found in the Counterculture and in the Movement. Anonymity characterized the social relationships at the mass gatherings such as Woodstock; it appeared in the Jesus movement, t o o - - first names only at the former, new names (i.e., a new identity) in the latter. In the Movement, first names or pseudonyms were used to guard against infiltrators, to reduce the chances o f arrest. In this, the Movement had clear historical threads to the union movement and to earlier right- and left-wing radical movements (e.g., Hofstadter, 1965). In the religious-psychic orientation of the Counterculture, there was a theme o f intense personal disclosure, often to a stranger (Simmel, 1950) or to a like-situated other. A n o n y m i t y in this sense is a thread which is found in the Catholic confession (O'Rourke, 1973) and in Alcoholics Anonymous, among other sources, a The social value and social norm o f anonymity were functional for relating themes o f the Counterculture and tlae Movement with specific social expectations o f behavior and with hotlines.
A n o n y m i t y in Hotlines A n o n y m i t y was a social norm and value in hotlines. The "political paranoia" of the Movement (Hoftstadter, 1965) along with the reality o f "getting busted" for talking about using drugs likely contributed to creating and sustaining the social norm o f anonymity. Even though the hotline operators were like the callers, someone else could be listening in; or the place could be broken into and records stolen. Fear o f the police and a magnification o f them as omnipresent and omnipotent were surely elements in the Movement and in the Counterculture. Also contributing to the norm o f anonymity in hotlines was the notion that last names were simply unnecessary. One did not have to know a person's last name in order to give referral information or to "rap." Last name, social security number, and address are important for records, for billing clients, and for follow-up. These were not elements o f h o t l i n e service. Other examples of "intimate" or pseudointimate relationships wherein anonymity is the rule include transient homosexual relationships (Humphreys, 1970), prostitute-client relationships, and maxriage-partner switches, i.e., "swinging" (Transaction/Society, 1972).
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Some Social Functions of Anonymity in Hotlines The social norm and social value of anonymity have been placed within the context of the hotline as a service for youth. Exanlined next are some social functions of hotline anonymity for individual youth and for youth as a population group.
Re: Youth Several theorists of youth discuss the "developmental tasks" of adolescence and the "need to experiment," to test oneself as a means of forming one's "self" (e.g., Erikson, 1971). This trying-out is thought to be difficult for the individual in our culture; it was exceptionally difficult during the 1960sa time of massive sociocultural change. Social roles in the Counterculture were often more emergent than clear and actual (depending on where one lived). The behaviors of a successful role occupant in the culture were new, often frightening, and sometimes potentially dangerous to the self, both psychologically and socially (e.g., arrest). The role of hotlines in relation to these sociocultural changes has been noted. For the individual youth, the issue was different although related.
Support for Experimen ration To experiment, to test, is "to risk" personal and interpersonal security, physical harm, and the like (e.g., Carney,.1971). Risk is probabilistic in that one rarely knows "for sure" what will happen. In one sense, the more atypical or socially deviant or illegal the activity one tries, the greater the social risk (objective social consequences) and, often, the greater the psychological experience of "taking a chance" (subjective personal consequences). Part of experinaenting and risk-taking is the probability of "getting caught," of retribution as in "being made to take responsibility for one's actions." Anonymity reduces the individual's risk of getting caught ("being turned in") and of legal prosecution. Consequently, anonymity in hotlines supports experimentation and risk-taking, basic developmental tasks of maturation, by reducing the chances of retribution (Konopka, 1973).
Reduce Dependency, Retain Autonomy The individual caller does not have to give his nan~e to get help, information, or someone to talk to. He can remain a "person" and not feel like a "client or patient." He does not have to give other "private" information. He cannot be forced to take a referral or be pushed around: he can hang up the phone. He has
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a degree of personal control over his identity and his life space. The young caller has control of his dependency on others. He can retain autonomy.
Participation in DecisioHs About Self The caller can bargain with the operator by managing his "presentation of the sell"' (Goffman, 1959). By this management and with the freedom to hang up the phone and thus "terminate" tile helping relationship, the caller can negotiate the "diagnosis" of his problem and the definition of responsibility in tile therapeutic relationship (e.g., Scheff, 1968). The power distribution between the helper and the one asking for help is changed: anonymity is functional in the distribution of power in interpersonal relations (see, e.g., Jourard on "selfdisclosure," 1971, and Moore and Tumin, 1949) and in the management of "'rejection" (Phillips, 1969). The young caller can bargain with the operator about his "problem." He can participate more fully in decisions which affect him. Reducing dependency on adults, retaining autonomy about his behavior, participating in decisions about self, bargaining with another can all be considered "anticipatory socialization" (Merton, 1957) to the values and social norms of adulthood, the group to which youth aspire, however ambivalently.
Modification o f Client Role Anonymity modifies the traditional human services client role. It is functional in redistributing power between the practitioner (the operator) and the client (the caller). This can be viewed as limiting the incorporation of the client into the agency, i.e., in reducing the agency's social control of individual youth. The traditional client role includes the social expectations of a commitment "to get better" with the help of another and the redefinition of self as problematic. The short-term nature of telephone counseling modifies these expectations of the client role. Anonymity supports these modifications in that the agency has few ways of finding and maintaining prolonged contact with the caller. These changes in client role have resulted in two phenomena: the emergence of a nonhelping caller role, "the crank," and the emergence of a social role which modifies the social norm and social value of anonymity, the "repeater."
Deviant Client Roles The "crank" is a caller who presents content which the particular hotline defines as "not a real problem." A crank call is an illegitimate call. A subtype of crank call is the obscene call. Both these types of calls may be the ones once
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received by private persons and reported by them to the local telephone company. These are now received in large numbers at hotlines. A n o n y m i t y has the latent social function (Merton, 1 9 5 7 ) o f facilitating these types of calls and o f limiting the hotline's ability to prevent or reduce them. A n o n y m i t y again is seen as modifying retribution. The "repeater" is a person who calls the hotline regularly. He becomes a "known person." Thus the repeater modifies the social norm and social value of caller anonymity. Where the crank presents illegitimate content, the repealer is seen by operators usually as a person who is not "really hurting." A subtype o f the repeater is the masturbator. 9 (There may be some overlap in the categories of the obscene call and the masturbation call, both in the actual persons who call and in the content o f the call. This is an empirical question, the answer to which is thought to vary by the culture o f the particular hotline.) The repeater is a deviant caller to the hotline in that he becomes known. From the perspective of anonymity, one might look to the particular callers to learn if these people need or want to make themselves known within the bounds o f anonymity; one could look also to the hotline to see if the operators recruit certain people to the social role o f repeaters so as to develop longer-lasting relationships with some callers. Both deviant caller roles are different than the traditional human service client roles and the new hotline client role. Both are in the social system o f hotlines and seem to be functional for the staff of the hotline. The crank caller is someone the operator can "tell off," while the repeater is someone the operator can have a longer-lasting relationship with. Both roles have a character related to the social norm and social value o f anonymity.
F I N A L NOTE The hotline is a very American invention. From Emily Post on telephone etiquette, we learned how to talk; from the Bell System we were encouraged to talk. Talk we have on the ubiquitous, intrusive telephone. The phone is as instant, as cheap, and as American as instant mashed potatoes. The phone is used with great social utility and worth in the hotlines. Another piece of technology has been harnessed.
REFERENCES Aronson, S. H. (1971). The sociology of the telephone. Internat. J. Comp. Sociol. 12: 153-167. 9There may be some merit in examining tile symbolic meaning of the word "liotline" for tile masturbator.
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