More than 1 billion children are abused in a year. These children are helpless. They are scared and do not know how to handle the stress and anxiety that comes along with the abuse. Chrissy Sykes is helping those little children and spreading the message of abuse prevention.
Chrissy Sykes was born in Zambia. She went to high school in Zimbabwe and moved to South Africa from Zimbabwe with only $600 (Zimbabwe dollars) and a suitcase in her early 20s.
She knew nobody, but she knew that she wanted to sing, and South Africa was the place she needed to be at that time. Within a year of arriving, with her hard work and dedication, she won a singing competition in front of 60,000 people and a recording contract. She loved every minute of her singing career, doing TV and live shows, songwriting and Recordings.
Like every young person, she had goals and when she got an offer to go to Nashville, USA, by a famous record producer (Pete Drake), she just had to go!
Life had other plans for her though, as on the way to America, on a layover in London, she read a
story in the newspaper that moved her tremendously.
“4-year-Kimberley, who died as a victim of child abuse, was starved, burned, neglected and finally killed by a kick to the head.”
She could not get this story out of her head. During the flight to the USA, she wrote a song called ‘Kimberley’ dedicated to this little girl.
One night, she was at a dinner party in Texas and she was asked to play the piano. So she played the song ‘Kimberly’ and her life completely changed from thereon.
The head of the Texas Child Welfare Board was at the dinner, and he asked her if they could use her song “Kimberley” for an awareness campaign for child abuse prevention month. So they recorded it and put the record out. It raised a huge amount of $70,000.
They asked her to do a month-long campaign around Texas to raise awareness, and she was thrilled to do this. She had always been a singer but never a public speaker. On the first day, they had arranged for her to speak to 500 children at a school. She had nothing prepared, so she went in and spoke honestly to the children about abuse.
She shared with them that she had been sexually abused as a child. Before that day, she had never shared her personal life with anyone. It was a life-changing experience for her. The next day she was in a school hall with 2000 children. She spoke to the children and sang some songs, and it just seemed that the combination of talking honestly and sharing music had a massive impact on the children.
At least 15% of children at each session came forward to share their abuse, to get help and ask questions. She talked to the Department of Education, and Human Services representatives, and suggested that she will write a dedicated program addressing the subject of abuse prevention using music as it was so powerful. They loved the idea.
The programme was approved in various states around the USA, and now it has worldwide success, reaching millions of children. For the next five years, she toured around schools all over America and presented the program to over 350,000 children.
It took her 4 years to learn how to animate, set up her music studio and create the first set of videos in English, and in 2017 she released the first animations. The videos were so well received that she received several requests to produce them in various languages.
Over the past few years, She has worked with wonderful volunteers around the world who have translated and sung the programme and songs in 19 different Languages.
She is the President of Child Welfare for the Global Goodwill Ambassadors Foundation. Her vision for the future is for communities to start addressing the problem of child abuse.
Chrissy Sykes is doing wonderful work to educate children about abuse. She has helped thousands of children to share their story and seek help. She has worked extremely hard to spread the message through music. She has inspired people globally.