Twenty years ago this week ChildLine was born into a very different world. Child protection was moulded by what adults thought children needed: nobody asked the children. The result was that myths were accepted as fact.

In the early 1980s I used to visit children in care. Nobody considered the possibility that any of the dedicated staff who looked after them could possibly pose a danger. Years later I was horrified when one of the boys confessed to me that a male house parent had been regularly sexually abusing 10 of the children I knew.

My cousin worked in the children’s home and disliked the house parent: “I realised that he was a bully and could be violent, but it never occurred to me that he was sexually abusing the children. That idea just wasn’t on our horizon.”

ChildLine, the children’s helpline, radically changed that perception. Fifty thousand attempted calls were made the night it was launched on BBC1, and the biggest single problem talked about was sexual abuse. They described a crime that was being committed in “respectable homes”; children rang the confidential helpline because they had been threatened into silence, told that nobody would believe them if they asked for help.

By and large that was true. The public was shocked by the revelation that child abuse was no respecter of geography, income, social status or ethnic group. The immediate impulse was to shoot the messenger. Childwatch, the BBC television programme on which ChildLine was launched, was branded “the most dangerous show in Britain”.

There are those who would still agree. A letter appeared last week in The Times attacking proposed legislation that would make it compulsory for all those, including volunteers, who work with children and vulnerable adults to be checked for criminal convictions. The letter said that criminals who abuse children are so rare the bill was unnecessary.

The children who call ChildLine tell a different story. The truth is that paedophiles are unscrupulous and cunning and they have taken jobs as school bus drivers, sports coaches and youth club leaders to gain access to children.

However, the letter does express a real fear. Over the past 20 years, alongside sensible advances such as the creation of commissioners for children and a minister for children, there have been examples of daft over-zealousness.

Why on earth prevent parents taking photographs of their children performing in a nativity play or pictures of their children playing football? The five-year-old who plays Joseph at Christmas time, the 10-year-old who scores a miraculous goal for his team, deserve their place in the family album.

The loss of innocent contact is a real deprivation for a child. Why shouldn’t a teacher cuddle a six-year-old who has fallen down in the playground? It would be a tragedy if fathers were inhibited from hugging their daughters. The abused children I have met desperately want and need the “safe cuddles” that they never receive. We do all children a huge disservice by assuming that all adults are paedophiles.

Such craziness affects genuine attempts to look after children. But tragically there is still a huge amount to do if we want to protect children from avoidable pain. Children in care are removed from their families because they were being badly treated, but once in care we treat them little better.

We also fail to listen to disabled children. Over the years I have met a number of deaf children, for instance, who had become suicidal because they were so lonely and bullied in mainstream schools. Yet over the past 20 years politicians have decided on politically correct principles to phase out special education. Inclusive education is right for some but not right for all. Once again they are making decisions without listening to the children themselves.

The biggest single problem that children now ring ChildLine about is bullying. Despite the fact that there is a requirement that every school must have an effective anti-bullying policy, 32,000 children rang ChildLine last year desperately asking how to deal with their tormentors.

It is estimated that 16 children a year kill themselves because of bullying. The most recent form of bullying is to send threatening text messages. The mobile phone is an example of a change in technology bringing advantages and problems.

It can be a new source of torture but it can also be a means of protecting children and saving lives.

Seventy per cent of all the calls made to ChildLine are by mobile phone. One little boy whispered over his phone that when he came home from school he was locked in the garden shed. How else could he possibly have asked for help? We must listen to what children themselves need and want. Family tension is the second biggest problem brought to ChildLine. When parents arrive home exhausted, when families scatter and shatter, when divorces are so common and often so vicious, who is making time or space for the children? I once heard a child in care say to her director of social services: “In the whole of my life nobody has ever told me they loved me.”

That is what every child instinctively needs. And that is what they will tell us, if only we will listen.