National Helpline officials said less than a month after its launching, they received 292 calls seeking information related to legal matters or assistance and other interventions and besides the women in distress, the callers included local government representatives, schoolteachers and male members of family.
Organization official Shaila Yasmin said the Helpline responded promptly and succeeded in resolving the problems of the women in trouble and others seeking the assistance and "at least four child marriages could be prevented in the past 21 days through this Helpline".
As their 10 days of desperate efforts failed to lodge a complaint with police against abduction of their 13-year old girl, the anxious parents preferred to seek the National Helpline intervention for her rescue - it worked and their daughter returned home on the next ninth day.
A youth of a neighbouring village in Lalmonirhat had kidnapped the girl from her school gate and subsequently declined to return her as her parents with supports of the people in the neighbourhood approached the kidnapper.
The peasant father of the girl Shamsul Haque said the situation forced him to seek the police intervention, but police refused to lodge the case saying it will need huge amount of money.
"With a help of a neighbour I called the National Helpline - they extended their hand and . . . I met the DC (deputy commissioner) . . . police took the case . . . they arrested (kidnaper) Zobaidul and my daughter returned home nine days later," Haque told BSS.
In another incident chairman of the Patgram upazila Ruhul Amin Babul called the Helpline seeking their intervention to stop marriage of 13-year old girl being informed by a schoolteacher as he came to know that she was being forced to marry.
"The Helpline people called me first after getting the upazila chairman's phone and as I explained them the matter . . . officials of the women affairs department and the district administration intervened and the girl's father agreed to change his mind," assistant teacher of the Rasulpur Abdal Hossain High School said.
The incidents was reported just days after the launching of the National Helpline service under the initiative of the Women and Family Welfare Ministry with objectives of extending all gender related supports, be it reproductive health, psychological assistance or police cases.