Claire joins the World's First Online March to Help Beat Bullying

Over 800,000 people have joined forces to hold the world's first ever virtual march organised by Beatbullying, Britain's leading anti-bullying charity to mark the start of Anti-Bullying Week. The march is streaming through dozens of supporter websites including claireperry.org.uk and will culminate at 10 Downing Street. The Beatbullying campaign is calling on the Government to do more to protect children from bullying, violence and harassment, which can have a devastating impact on young lives.

Commenting, Claire Perry, MP for the Devizes Constituency said:

"My online avatar is proudly marching today along with hundreds of thousands of others across the internet to demonstrate my support for the Beatbullying campaign. Bullying can devastate young lives and more than 30 per cent of children have been bullied in the last year. I am calling on the Coalition government to do all it can to implement long-term solutions to bullying."

Notes

To mark the launch of Anti-Bullying Week 2010 on Monday, 15th November, The Big March has of thousands of avatars of children, parents, teachers and celebrities marching across the computer screens via more than fifty partners' homepages to take a stand against bullying. The march is crossing Claire Perry's own website; www.claireperry.org.uk More information about the March can be found at http://www.beatbullying.org/bigmarchAccording to Beatbullying figures:

• 30 per cent of children and young people report being bullied at school in the last year. 26 per cent of children and young people report being bullied outside of school in the last year.
• 1 in 3 to 16 year olds have been deliberately cyber bullied. For a quarter of these, the experience was ongoing, meaning that 1 in 13 children were persistently cyber bullied.
• In 2007/8, 15.7 per cent of all permanent exclusions of children from primary, secondary, and special schools were as a result of physically assaulting another pupil.
• 36 per cent of school absences were caused by bullying in the UK in 2006.
• 44 per cent of suicides committed by young people in the UK are associated with experiences of bullying.

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