I knew I had reached a landmark in my life.

The cliché is of a light-bulb moment, and indeed that is exactly what I experienced one morning in the spring of 1986. I had come to work, having just made a tv programme which included an item about an abused child.

And now I was standing in a BBC office, listening to social workers describing how many children had phoned our programme’s helpline, which was only open for 48 hours after one episode of the consumer programme That’s Life!

In that short time, around one hundred children had rung to disclose abuse they had never been able to talk about to anyone else.

The safety and anonymity of the phone-line had liberated them.

The social workers explained to me that when the young people rang, they were told for the first time that the abuse was not their fault, that they deserved to be kept safe, and that we cared about them, and that was transformative.

Being listened to gave them confidence, and hope.

That morning we realised that through the telephone we had been able to reach out to abused children who until then had been hidden underneath the radar, whom nobody else knew about, nobody was protecting.

In that moment I realised that this was more important than any other work I had ever done, and in that proverbial light-bulb moment, the idea struck me that we needed to create a helpline specifically for children, so they could ask for help any time of day or night, every day of the year.

We launched Childline 33 years ago, on October 30 1986, and in that first night there were 50,000 attempted calls.

Childline has changed over the years, it had to.

Now most young people reach out to us on-line, or by mobile phones.

But we can still only answer 3 out of 4 young people who need us.

We need more funds of course, and we also urgently need more volunteers.

We will train you, and in return, we ask for one four hour shift a week.

And our volunteers tell me the weekly shift they spend with us is the best time of their week, because they know they are making a difference. And nothing is more important.

To contact Childline ring 0800 1111 or visit: www.childline.org.uk

To find out more about volunteering visit: www.nspcc.org.uk/what-you-can-do/

Esther Rantzen