Watkinsville, GA—Bullying victims are up to nine times more likely to kill themselves. One local woman who grew up with bullies telling her she should take her own life, decided she wasn’t going to wind up a statistic and now she is doing her part to make sure other lives aren’t lost.

Frances Gibson made a promise that she would make a difference one day. It started with a dress shop, but today it’s so much more.

In this little store, you can find dresses for any occasion, in different sizes and different shapes, something unique and one of a kind. But when Frances Gibson, the owner of Dover Grace Alternative Boutique, saw young girls going thru her dresses, she saw that they didn’t always celebrate their differences.

“The girls were being bullied” says Gibson, “They weren’t talking about it but they started talking to me about it, and since I started this location, I started taking a stand and talking about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you realize, what a huge problem it is.”

That’s why Gibson started asking for the pictures of people who had been victims of bullying and asking for the stories behind them. Her plan is to put up all the pictures that she gets on a wall in her boutique to put a face on the pain and show them that they are not alone.

She says, that “For someone to make you feel so insignificant that you are ashame of yourself, you are ashame of who you are, your mother your friends, and you cant take it anymore…it goes on”. This is a pain that Gibson hopes her wall will help heal. “This are people who their parents gave birth to them, and they thought you can be anything that you want, and somehow, this people, will convince them they are not even worthy of breathing, and its not ok” she says.

What is OK to Gibson, is for bullying victims to share and to heal because “There’s no such thing as a good secret, you’re worth it, you matter, you matter, you matter”.

If you would like to share your picture and story with Frances, you can email her to WeAreDoverGrace@gmail.com.

Reported by: Natalia Rodriguez