In an age when anti-social behavior is rife and victims fear reprisals if they dare to speak out, Glen Reynolds has spent much of his life championing the oppressed, and in his new role at Victim Support he hopes to make a difference in the North-East. Alison Lewis reports.

THE sound of wailing and screaming came through the darkness as Glen Reynolds arrived at a troubled village in South Africa. He had been tipped-off that there would be trouble and as he and some colleagues got out of their vehicles they knew the information they had received was reliable.

Confronted with the dead, dying and distraught survivors of a massacre at the notorious hotspot of Richmond, Glen describes how he lost track of reality.

"What I saw there is the most awful thing I have ever seen. We went into the village that had been attacked by the ANC and we were there probably about ten or 15 minutes after the attack.

"There were bodies strewn around the mud huts, there was wailing and screaming. Local people were trying to put some of the wounded or dead and dying into the back of trucks and take them to hospital. The adrenaline was pumping and I think I sort of lost any sense of reality.

"We helped carry bodies onto lorries, but then we heard gunfire from the valleys, quite close to where we were. These were Kalashnikov rounds coming over in our direction, they were snapping all around us and off the tin roofs.

"At that time everyone got into the vehicles and we got the hell out of there. If we had stayed I think we would have been in trouble."

The attack happened in 1997 while Glen was working for human rights organisation Black Sash in the troubled province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

"I had never seen victims in reality before this, only on film," he says. "It is one of the poorest areas of South Africa and because of what was going on with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was a real period of soul searching for the population.

'But also it was an area which was a war zone between the Zulu people and the ANC - black on black violence on a big scale. South Africa was coming to terms with HIV and Aids and the extent of its poverty and that was what I was involved with, compiling a report on welfare rights."

Glen, 45, now works as a consultant for Victim Support in County Durham, a role which involves raising the charity's profile, as it works with victims of crime, domestic violence and witnesses of crimes who are at risk.

This is alongside his consultancy work for Age Concern in Darlington and his role as a borough councillor for the Park East ward in the town.

He says his drive to fight injustices stems from his childhood, when he lived in a predominantly Jewish area of London, where many of his friends' grandparents had died in Auschwitz and Dachau. As a boy he heard stories about the infamous Second World War concentration camps and subsequently met survivors.

"I think that, because I was at that impressionable age, those images and stories have played a big part in my life," he says.

He opted for a career in law, but when he qualified in 1984 he began working with a practice which specialised in showbusiness clients and newspapers. One of his major clients was the satirical magazine Private Eye, where at the time, now editor and Have I Got News for You panellist Ian Hislop, was a junior.

His experiences at Private Eye led him not only to defend the publication, but also to write for it. Glen found himself in the world of investigative journalism, tracking down and interviewing gun runners, and writing about them for Private Eye. This work resulted in him having bodyguards and regularly receiving death threats, but it all came to an abrupt halt when his parents' lives were threatened.

"I think a large part of my tragedy is that I'm courageous but incredibly nave and I think sometimes I thrived on the adrenaline, without recognising there were serious risks involved," he says.

"But, for me, it was all about getting to the truth and bringing down those people that appear whiter than white, especially where they have done wrong and there are victims involved."

After Private Eye he spent several years working for Robert Maxwell's Mirror Group as a litigation lawyer. He stresses he had nothing to do with the pensions side of the business, but also says he does not believe Maxwell intended to defraud the Mirror pensioners.

"I think he just died at the wrong time and he was using pension assets in a way which at the time was unclear as to what was legal and what was not. If you look at any billionaire or anyone with his sense of power you will be very lucky if you don't find some serious skeletons."

Glen says his former employer was a contradiction: "When I was first taken on by Maxwell my grandfather had just died and, after the interview, he said, "Give my regards to your family and I'm sorry for your loss".

"I remember coming out of there thinking that was a nice thing. But I have also known Maxwell to demand to speak to one of his personal secretaries at the time she was standing over her father's grave at his funeral.

"I think he was a lonely man, who was driven by power," Glen says. "I liked working for him, but I didn't like him, you couldn't help being fearful of him. But from a lawyer's point of view he was a dream - incredibly litigious and money was no object."

Glen left his job with Maxwell four months before the tycoon "went overboard". At the time he was under a lot of pressure, his father was diagnosed with cancer and he was nursing a friend who was HIV positive.

"It was all a bit much and I decided to take some time out," he explains. "I was completely burned out and I decided then that I didn't want to do the legal work I had been doing."

It was then that he was offered a job with the Black Sash group. During that time he began writing for the Natal Witness, the local newspaper and the oldest in South Africa, and rekindling his investigative journalism work.

He was leaked documents which showed financial irregularities involving the government, totalling £10m. "We recovered that money, which should have gone to a conflict resolution organisation, but it had been diverted elsewhere through corruption."

Although there were concerns the story would earn him unwanted attention, it also brought him recognition from Nelson Mandela.

Glen continued his work with victims when he went to Columbia for Christian Aid, where he worked with children whose families had been killed by paramilitaries.

"We played football on a field where, the week before, paramilitaries had played football with people's heads. We were staying at a refugee camp that had been grenade attacked," he explains.

"You can hate yourself because you are part of a world that allows these things to happen," he says. "I have such a massive sense of how unjust and awful the world can be that it makes me very angry and frustrated.

"In South Africa I worked as a Father Christmas at an AIDS orphanage and everything pales into insignificance when you hold in your arms kids who have done nothing wrong, but were born HIV positive and yet can still smile at you. It tests you, it really does."