Jessica Bondy, Founder, Words Matter
What is Words Matter and why did you create it?
Words Matter is an ambitious new charity on a mission to improve children’s mental and physical health and development by helping to end verbal abuse of children by adults around them. I founded it because of my own personal experience, but also as a result of the numerous children, young people and adults I coached that had all been affected by the words they had heard when growing up.
Often going unnoticed and not properly acknowledged, childhood verbal abuse by adults, which may take the form of blaming, insulting, belittling, criticising, name calling and threatening a child, can cause lasting damage. It can impact a child’s sense of self, their future relationships and their ability to function at home, school, work and in social situations, often for a lifetime. Importantly, it is not just shouting and screaming. Verbal abuse can also be quiet, insidious and subtle. Tone, volume and facial expression all play a part.
We all have a responsibility to help children flourish and protect them from verbal abuse, which is why I felt compelled to set up Words Matter. We are the first organisation in the world to focus solely on addressing this issue.
What is Words Matter doing?
Working in partnership with experts, decision makers, non-profit and other organisations and those with lived experience, we focus on three areas:
● Research – Conducting research to better understand the scale and impact of verbal abuse of children.
● Awareness – Raising awareness through national campaigns, events and providing access to free educational resources.
● Collaboration – Collaborating with academics, clinicians, charities, child development specialists, policy makers and people with lived experience to create effective solutions that lead to long-term change.
We all get overloaded sometimes. As well as caring passionately about making life better for children, we’re here for parents, carers, teachers, or people that are around children from every walk of life. More support can lighten the load for everyone.
What work have you done so far?
Despite only being registered officially as a charity in December 2022 (Charity number 1201281), we have already made great progress in all our three focus areas. We have also set up a high profile Advisory Board of renowned experts from around the globe.
Research
We have already funded four major pieces of research through leading organisations.
We commissioned the first systematic review on childhood verbal abuse with University College London (UCL) and Wingate (US) which was recently published in the October issue of Child Abuse & Neglect: The International Journal. This major piece of research urges formal recognition of childhood verbal abuse by adults as a distinct category of child maltreatment so that targeted preventive action can be taken. We also tasked UCL with conducting a Delphi study to establish consensus around definition, who should be involved in addressing childhood verbal abuse and primary actions.
We conducted qualitative research amongst parents and children aged 11 - 17 years with ‘Family Kids & Youth’ (FK&Y) and quantitative research amongst 1,000 plus parents and children of the same age. It revealed that two in five (41%) children experience adults regularly using hurtful and upsetting words to blame, insult or criticise children. The study identified the most harmful of these words and phrases to children, as well as showed the huge power of positive words on a child’s feeling about themselves and real value of encouragement, reassurance and acceptance.
You can find further details on our research findings here.
Awareness
In addition to launching our new website on 13th September and a new video, we also released the children’s research findings. We were a trending story on HuffPost and among other things, we made the front page of the leading children’s newspaper First News which has a readership of 2.6m and goes into 50% of schools in the UK.
Our systematic review findings were a front page story on The Guardian and it was covered in over 100 outlets across the globe including in press, TV and radio.
We created some special resources which are available for FREE online for all adults, parents, teachers and those with lived experience.
This is just the beginning, we will be creating new campaigns to ensure childhood verbal abuse by adults is kept profile and solutions are developed and distributed.
Collaboration
We are delighted that we will be hosting the first international event on childhood verbal abuse with the World Health Organization (WHO), and University College London’s (UCL) Division of Psychology and Language Sciences. It will take place on 11 April 2024 from 10.00 - 17.00 hrs BST. It is FREE to attend and you can find details and register here.
The event will bring together presentations from global experts in the study of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), neuroscience, developmental psychology, and public health to elucidate and promote discussions on unifying definitions, impact, societal cost burden, and prevention.
We are pleased that so many organisations and leading children’s charities have agreed to support our mission and collaborate with us going forward. These include not only the Resilience Group, but Anna Freud, Barnado’s, Save the Children, Place2Be, MHI/Shout 85258, The Mix and the NSPCC.
Support us
Together we can change lives. Please help us spread the message that words matter, and support our work to stop verbal abuse of children so they can reach their full potential.
If you would like to get involved, please drop us a line at hello@wordsmatter.org.
If you would like to donate, here is the link.
Words matter. Let’s build children up, not knock them down.
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