The project’s overall ambition was to decrease gender-based violence (GBV) in the 32 participating schools by working with around 1200 facilitators in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Greece, school staff and management, parents, as well as youth. We helped them increase awareness of harmful social and gender norms and behaviors, understand how to challenge them and promote positive ones.
On the short term, at least 280 young people and school staff have become aware of the gender aspect and scale of school violence by being involved in the initial assessment. Then, based on the adapted CARING methodology, 64 school facilitators have trained 320 school staff and management.
On the long-term, the approximately 384 professionals have become aware of the gender dimension of school violence, being equipped with knowledge to recognize it and skills to prevent, mediate and combat it – with prevalence to those cases most specific to one gender for their own countries, such as physical violence amongst boys and harmful sexual behaviour against girls. They have also been enabled to systematically promote gender equality and non-discrimination at the institutional level. These professionals have become active promoters against GBV, being able to influence their current and future colleagues to become more accepting of the gender dimension in general and its influence on violence in schools specifically. All these professionals have developed gender sensitive behaviour and became role models to young people from each generation of students they work with currently and in the future.
The school staff and management have felt on the short-term more self-confidence, support and empathy, benefitting from a more fluent, sympathetic and effective communication with their peer colleagues during the 5 support sessions. Also on the short-term, these professionals have developped the skills to empower boys and girls to transform unequal and harmful gendered power relations, having increased their own commitment to the fight against GBV and ability to apply participatory methods. Through the 12 networking meetings, school staff have felt more connected and supported as they consolidate their GBV prevention strategies together with child protection professionals such as social workers. The 256 students who worked with the trained professionals have felt that their voice was heard and felt more self-confidence and empathy on the short-term. These students were led through a process of identifying social and gender norms around GBV in their school and community and changed their behaviours towards their peers.
On the medium term, they built on positive norms to address harmful norms related to GBV, and felt empowered to participate at preventing, combating and responding to peer violence through self-developed solutions. They were prepared to become agents of change in their school communities, developing and organizing their own initiatives against GBV targeted at their parents, teachers, peers or the local community – reaching at least 1700 people who became more aware of the phenomena. Simultaneously, around 480 parents of these students have understood the influences of gender on their children’s lives through the thematic meetings.
On the long-term, these parents became more capable to support their children and acknowledge the importance of children’s involvement in finding solutions to issues they are facing. At community level, on the short-term, various stakeholders have seen the urgent need to respond firmly to GBV: around 600 stakeholders have participated to the online webinars, the final conference or accessed the materials published in the GBV community of practice hosted by ChildHub. Regional and national public institutions such as the Ministry of Education and regional school inspectorates (some of which already endorsed the project) have become more aware of the typology of SRGBV, received specific data on this topic from the schools involved in the project, which can influence violence prevention mechanisms. Moreover, these institutions have the capacity to further disseminate the project’s deliverables to other schools, therefore by doing this, they are considered active actors in the GBV prevention. As a result of receiving accreditation of the CARING training course by the providers of continuous professional development for didactic staff (public ones in particular), other teachers benefited from the knowledge and competence development. By accessing information included in the training materials, the Capitalization Report presenting the project’s best practices, or by participating in the final conference, stakeholders were capacitated on the short-term to replicate the project’s results in their own contexts at EU level, based on their specific needs.
Co-funded by the European Union
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
