Anti-Bullying Shared Kids
| Published: 22nd May 2008 10:28 |
Anti-Bullying Shared Kids
The Abs Kids website was first formed as a charity in November 2005. Abbi Morrall who lives in Hinckley in Leicestershire runs it.
Abbi was bullied herself for many years at primary school and dealt with the problem her own, telling no one what she was going through.
In Year 6 at school she started helping others through being a member of the School Council and also getting involved with Anti-Bullying work through Leicestershire County Council.
She became a member of the Anti-Bullying Alliance that helps try to combat bullying in school. She also became a Peer Mentor, helping others in her lunch hour at school who may be suffering bullying and who needed someone to talk to.
All this work led to the launch of the Abs Kids website. Her dad had noted that although there were many websites for bullied children, there wasn't one that runs by a teenager, someone who had suffered like they were.
Abbi won the first Princess Diana Anti-Bullying Award through the Anti-Bullying Alliance and shortly afterwards she won a Champion of Respect Award after being nominated by her drama teacher at school. This award was presented by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the £500 prize she received helped towards starting the website.
The whole format of the website and the design are all Abbi's own ideas and were put place by professional web designers who helped make it as "child friendly" as possible. On the site, kids are able to share their experiences of bullying with others as well as an Abbi questions through e-mail. The site offers help and advice to not only kids, but to teachers and parents as well.
The site contains a short film which was written by Abbi about a girl who is being bullied. The film was made with the help of Abbi's drama teacher and several friends. See the film Becky' s Story
The site itself has been featured on TV, Radio and in the Hinckley Times and Leicester Mercury both of who follow the progress of the site and feature any updates regularly.
In September 2006, Abbi and her mum appeared on the Sharon Osbourne Show on ITV to talk about bullying and the site. The site received a massive response receiving hundreds of e-mails within ten minutes of the show being aired. Abbi was given the opportunity to meet and interview David Beckham, a dream come true for a girl also plays football and runs her own soccer camp for younger children ever Saturday morning. She returned to the show a couple of weeks later when the interview was shown. Both Sharon Osbourne and David Beckham were very impressed with the site.
Following this, in March 2007 she was invited onto ITV's This Morning, again to speak about her bullying and took part in their phone-in live on air.
She has also taken part in shows on BBC Radio Leicester, Touch FM in Coventry, interviews on Central News and BBC Midlands Today and Rock FM in Preston.
A writer who lives in Spain is compiling a book on bullying and a section for this book is to written about Abbi and her experiences.
Abbi has won many others awards apart from two already mentioned BT "Seen & Heard" Award, Wavemakers Award, Anne Frank Award, Children of Excellence to name a few.
Abbi works tirelessly to help others who are suffering the torment of bullying. She has helped so many kids beat the bullies through constant e-mails that arrive daily on the site. To receive the amount of thanks you that she gets when she helped people really make it all worthwhile.
She took her campaign to Parliament and her whole family were invited to a meeting at the House of Commons with the Shadow Minister for Schools, Nick Gibb MP. Abbi expressed to him her concerns at the way schools handled the issue of bullying and felt that changes needed to be made if bullying was to be stopped. Through the site Abbi also has to tackle the issue of self-harming and suicide, when the bullying can get too much to handle for some kids.
Abbi heard of one teenager with who had communicated through e-mails. The girl's mother informed Abbi the she taken her own life because of the stress she was suffering. Although deeply upset, this made Abbi more determined to continue with her work.
The site relies totally on fund raising and donations from businesses etc. and all monies Abbi makes from her soccer camp goes directly to this site. This allows her to keep the site updated with different features and up to date with the different types of bullying, which happens today.
The initial start up and upkeep of the site has cost Abbi's dad over £5000. Funding is desperately needed to allow the site to continue. She has helped so many kids across the country to combat bullying and after communicating with Abbi they feel have found a new friend they can confide in. Many of them e-mail her just to let her know that things are still going OK, or others let to know that they have been bullied again only this time they knew how to cope with it, thanks to Abbi's help.
See the website abs-kids.co.uk
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