CyberMentors

» see cybermentors.org.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

CyberMentors went live in March 2009 at cybermentors.org.uk, launched by Gordon Brown while he was still Prime Minister, and run by BeatBullying, a charity Emma-Jane Cross had started in 1999 to work inside British schools. It looked like a social network of the period, with profiles and a chat window, and it was pointed at one thing: an eleven to eighteen year old who was being bullied and had nobody safe to tell.

What made it unusual was who answered. The mentors were other children, aged eleven to eighteen themselves, trained to an ASDAN qualification that covered child protection and self-harm. Above them sat Senior CyberMentors between eighteen and twenty-five, and above those a bench of qualified counselors who could be pulled into a conversation the moment it went somewhere a teenager should not handle alone.

The scale arrived fast. By November 2009 the site had 1,815 trained mentors and forty volunteer counselors, and had been through 217,157 unique users in its first eight months. It won the Third Sector Excellence Award for digital media that same year, BeatBullying's turnover reached £2.4 million by 2012, and the model was exported to seven other European countries.

~ the record ~

~ how the mentoring worked ~

The design decision underneath it is still the interesting part. Adults staffing a helpline are expensive, and a fifteen year old being bullied often does not want an adult anyway, because adults tell schools and schools make it worse. Putting trained peers on the front line was cheaper and, for the specific problem, better. The supervision layer was what kept it from being reckless.

It also gave the mentors something. A lot of them had been bullied earlier and came back to work the other side of the conversation, which is a shape you see in peer support generally and rarely see built into a website with this much structure around it.

~ the collapse ~

BeatBullying ran on short-term grants, and it kept expanding on the assumption that the next one would land. The Cabinet Office had given £1.3 million from its social action fund, there was £185,000 from the European Union, and in 2013 the charity launched MindFull, a mental health service for the same age group, on the same funding logic. In 2014 two expected grants worth £1.4 million between them did not come through and the Department for Education started reconsidering its arrangements.

Staff had been on half pay since August 2014. In early October the offices closed and the site stopped working, replaced by a message telling children in trouble to contact Samaritans or ChildLine instead. On 6 November 2014 BeatBullying went into voluntary liquidation after failing to find a buyer, owing creditors around £1 million. The Charity Commission later found it had not complied with its own reserves policy, and the Cabinet Office looked into recovering £400,000 of its grant.

By then the CyberMentors brand had already been folded away. The domain had been redirecting to beatbullying.org since early 2014 under a rebrand to BeatBullying Mentors, so the name most of those million and a half children knew was gone before the service was.

~ the address now ~

cybermentors.org.uk still resolves. It serves a review site for online casinos that accept British players outside the national self-exclusion scheme, with an expert-guide headline and affiliate links down the page. The address where bullied children were once matched with trained fifteen year olds now sells slot machines to people who have asked to be blocked from gambling.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »