69 4 ALEXA HEPBURN AND JONATHAN POTTER Interrogating Tears Some Uses of “Tag Questions” in a Child-Protection Helpline For several years we have worked with the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) to understand what happens on their child protec- tion helpline, which takes more than quarter of a million calls each year. 1 This is a challenging environment for the child protection officers (CPOs) who take calls and for the callers, who are often reporting disturbing worries about friends, relatives or neighbors. It is also a major research challenge to unravel the complexity of what is going on. Calls are highly varied in the class, region, and ethnicity of the caller and the nature and severity of what is reported. Although the helpline can provide coun- seling, information, and advice, its central role is to field reports of abuse that may require action. When serious abuse is suspected, the NSPCC is legally mandated to pass the report on; typically this involves an immediate follow-up call to the relevant social services department. Calls reporting abuse average a little more than fifteen minutes but can be shorter or last more than an hour. A range of features of the help- line interaction have been studied in our previous work (Hepburn 2005, 2006; Hepburn and Potter 2007; Hepburn and Wiggins 2005; Potter 2005; Potter and Hepburn 2003, in press a, in press b). Most of our work was done in the London call center, where up to eighteen CPOs might be on duty at one time. Our corpus has evolved, but we have worked with a primary set of some 140 calls. One thing that CPOs repeatedly told us was that dealing with callers who cry is particularly challenging. It seems that the problem is not just that it may be upsetting talking to distressed people (after all, upset is com- mon on this helpline, and all CPOs taking calls have at least three years of field experience in child protection). There is a delicate interactional challenge to be man- aged here; the difficulty seems to be keeping the focus on the abused child and, at the 0001096466.INDD 69 0001096466.INDD 69 8/10/2009 7:40:08 PM 8/10/2009 7:40:08 PM