For more information visit: http://www.survivorsmanchester.org.uk/
There has been a long-riding stigma around the topic of male abuse that has led to hundreds of thousands of men shying away from finding help after suffering from horrific physical and mental cruelty. While there are endless amounts of counselling outlets for women who have experienced abuse, places for men to seek the same solace are few and far between.
But one Manchester-based charity is looking to change that. Survivors Manchester, established in 2009, offers free counselling online for male victims of abuse, rape and violence. It aims to create and facilitate a safe space for male survivors of traumatic experiences to work through personal and painful issues, and empower them to make positive life choices in order to heal.
Its website — a 24-hour hub of advice and support — is hosted on UKFast’s eCloud Public.
CEO Duncan Craig explained why he set up the charity.
“The recognition of the need for a charity for male survivors of abuse and violence came from my own need for support,” he said. “I was abused in my late childhood, and I kept it quiet for 20 years. During my training to be a therapist, I looked to find some support and realised there was nothing around for men, so I decided to rally a couple of people together and start something.
“The men who come to us for support have usually been abused at a young age, and as a result are facing problems with drug or alcohol abuse, their mental health or things like housing and finding a job. Since our inception we’ve helped over 500 men turn their lives around.”
Survivors Manchester has achieved endless success over the last six years, including its work with TV soap Hollyoaks, to help deliver a storyline surrounding the rape of a male character.
UKFast began working together with Survivors Manchester when it noticed the charity was experiencing problems with its previous hosting, after Duncan took to Twitter to appeal for help.
The charity had been offline for a number of days following a power outage in its American host’s network. Realising that Survivors Manchester needs to be online 24-hours a day to deliver its real-time chat facility to its users, and wanting to help a fellow Mancunian organisation, UKFast immediately set to work building a new hosting solution on its eCloud Public platform.
Since then, Survivors Manchester has been able to provide a faster, more tailored range of support to its users, with more men visiting the site than ever before.
Duncan said: “UKFast are our knights in shining armour. Our website is very important to what we do; for a lot of organisations, it’s a bolt on to their work. For us, it’s a critical space — a self-help and counselling outlet for men who need immediate support.
“UKFast came to our rescue when our website was down and we couldn’t have been more thankful. We’re now able to speak to abuse victims quicker, and more frequently, and maintain that link in communication which means that we can help more people.
“We always try our best to ‘buy local’, so I’m really pleased that we can have this connection with such a key service inside Manchester. UKFast is ideally placed with its knowledge of support and we can use that to help us go forward, in terms of new thinking and new technologies.
“UKFast is always going to be able to help us change the way we deliver our support to meet our users’ needs, so it’s a perfect partnership.”
Duration: 5:6
Publisher: UKFast
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