Children’s Mental Health Week from 5-11 February to highlight the escalating mental health crisis facing young people. Working alongside this is Rites for Girls CIC, a UK non-profit working to alleviate the suffering and distress of preteen and teenage girls, which is preparing to extend its outreach, launching 10 new programmes across the UK in Spring 2024.
The first of these one-year Girls Journeying Together programmes will take place in Frome where a Taster Session provides the opportunity for girls in the region to get a lived experience of what the programme involves.
Kim McCabe, Founder-Director of Rites for Girls and author of From Daughter to Woman: Parenting girls safely through their teens, said, “We have seen a dramatic rise in self-harming, eating disorders, panic attacks and school-refusing among girls at increasingly young ages since the onset of the pandemic, and yet there is a concerning lack of effective government support and school resources available in Britain to support these young people.
“The need for solutions to this crisis has never been more urgent. Thanks to funding from the National Lottery Community Fund awarded in recognition of the effectiveness of our work generating high levels of mental wellbeing for girls in communities across the country, we are now able to offer fully-funded bursary places on our flagship Girls Journeying Together programmes to girls with otherwise limited access.
“And during Children’s Mental Health Week, with its message ‘Your Voice Matters’ – the core tenet of our work with the girls – we are eager to spread the word that we’re making our programmes accessible to as many girls as possible.”
While the NHS ‘Mental Health of Children and Young People, 2023’ report concluded that 20.3% of eight to 16-year-olds had a probable mental disorder in 2023 – research from UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies (November 2020) showed higher levels of psychological distress among girls and highlighted a sharp rise in the numbers of girls self-harming and suffering from clinical depression during the pandemic, from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3.
Rites for Girls’ mission is to change the world one girl at a time, by making the lives of girls safer, kinder and better supported. Since its inception in 2011, the CIC has welcomed more than 1,000 girls aged 8-18yrs to its programmes and feedback from the girls is overwhelmingly positive. Responses to a recent survey showing that 97% feel better about the future, 96% saying they now know how to take better care of themselves and 98% would recommend the programme to other girls.
With a focus on enhancing the mental wellbeing of girls preventatively, Girls Journeying Together groups (GJT) offer a year of in-person monthly support for pre-teen girls, aged 10-12 (and their mothers via mothers’ circles), supporting their transition from primary to secondary school as they practice being true to themselves, learn about puberty, share their hopes and fears, and help each other into their teens.