Jewish teens create social action campaign to help male abuse victims

Jewish teenagers on a three-week course with youngsters of other faiths have come up with an innovative social action campaign to help male victims of abuse.

The group of ten teens came up with the idea while at the culmination of a three-week course run by JLGB (Jewish Lads and Girls’ Brigade), which runs a multi-faith National Citizen Service (NCS) programme.

Organisers said they chose the subject for their project “because of how male victims of domestic abuse are often ignored and side-lined despite the harrowing experiences they endure”.

The team, which had earlier honed its skills in film-making, decided to create a campaign aimed at encouraging male victims of domestic abuse to call national hot-lines and get help.

That campaign, titled ‘Just a Call, That’s All,’ includes a short advert, a film to be released on Instagram on Twitter, and an awareness-raising day in central London, with the teenagers handing out posters in busy areas such as Canary Wharf.

Team member Bella Lanning, 16, who attend JCoSS, said it had been “a life-changing experience for me,” while her fellow team member Michael Wahnon, 16, who attends Yavneh College, described it as “an extremely rewarding experience”.

A JLGB spokeswoman described how the idea came from Wahnon in the first place. “Michael said he had read an article about how men were often ignored or hung up on when they called abuse hotlines and was shocked by this,” she said. “He told his team members and they decided to get behind a campaign.”

Other teams created initiatives based on their own skill-set, including a “teach granny tech” campaign from the digital team, a poverty-awareness stall from the catering team and an exhibit highlighting the problem of litter from the photography team.