People Involved: Richard Barron

Partners: Beatbullying

URLs related to this project: www.beatbullying.org/

Where is the need for this project?

Over a million children and young people in the UK have been bullied in the last year. Increasingly, the problem of bullying does not just exist within schools. In 2006, a BeatBullying survey found 47% of young people have suffered some form of text, video, email or online bullying.

Where do you hope this project can go?

Cybermentors takes Beatbullying’s proven and award-winning bullying prevention work and applies it online. The project works with young people, training them as peer mentors in schools and online – supporting their peers as they use web, mobile and text services. In the three weeks following its launch, Cybermentors received 23,000 hits to its website and had already puts counsellors in on the ground to 250 emergency situations. Having made a profound difference to many of the schools with which it has been able to work offline, Cybermentors offers BeatBullying the chance to take this work to a truly national scale, offering access to support to any young person facing bullying.