Reducing violence in schools – CARING project kicked off in Bucharest

Following the successful completion of the REVIS - REsponding to VIolence against children in Schools and adjacent settings project, the work on reducing violence in schools continues in a new project: CARING - Challenging social and gender norms to reduce violence against children in school.

The participants of the CARING project are experienced child protection organizations such as Terre des hommes (Tdh) offices in Romania, Greece, and Hungary; Brave Phone in Croatia; and SAPI and Association Roditeli in Bulgaria.

The CARING project, running from 1 May 2023 to 30 April 2025, is co-funded by the European Union, and is coordinated by Tdh Romania.

The project’s overall ambition is to decrease gender-based violence (GBV) in the 32 participating schools in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Greece.

This is to be achieved by equipping around 1200 facilitators, school staff and management, parents, as well as youth with increased awareness of harmful social and gender norms and behaviors, as well as knowledge on how to challenge them and to promote positive ones.

On the short term, at least 280 young people and school staff will start to 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 will train 320 school staff and management.

On 14-15 June 2023, representatives of the project partners gathered for a meeting in Bucharest to officially kick off the project. The partners discussed the work packages and project outputs, project management plan and tools, financial management, monitoring and evaluation, communication plan.

Important topics, such as the Child protection approach in Tdh and experiences of partners in the area of GBV, were also presented by experts.

The CARING project will build on relevant Tdh methodologies, including:

• YouCreate: a PAR (Participatory Action Research) project aimed to train youth leaders, with the support of Adult Allies, to lead their peers in implementing participatory arts-based research projects and ‘Art Actions’ - arts-based activities designed to address issues of significance to youth in their community.
• REVIS methodology: it supports facilitators, teachers or school staff to take children and young people on a journey to explore social and gender norms around violence against children in their school and community, and engage them in activities to build on positive norms to address harmful norms related to violence against children.  
• ACTIV project: it approached the gender-based violence issue through activities addressed to 375 teachers and 250 pupils from schools. The project outputs of interest for CARING are (currently being translated in EN): Teacher training methodology, Children Advisory Board methodology, Research Report. 

At the kick-off meeting, other relevant topics were introduced, all focusing on the importance and modalities of ensuring meaningful participation and empowerment of children in all projects in Tdh, the set up and requirements of the Child Consultative Boards, and Tdh’s safeguarding policy and mechanism.

The work in the framework of  the CARING project has been already started by the consortium. The development of the rapid assessment methodology and tools is already ongoing. It will provide the partners with findings from the 32 participating schools, serving as a base for the curricula readjustment of Tdh’s existing methodologies on GBV prevention by addressing the existing social and gender norms.

The CARING project is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors 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.