CARING - Challenging social and gender norms to reduce violence against children in school

The project’s overall ambition is to decrease gender-based violence (GBV) in the 32 participating schools in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Greece, 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, knowledge on how to challenge them and promoting 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 the long-term, the approximately 384 professionals will 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 will also be enabled to systematically promote gender equality and non-discrimination at the institutional level. These professionals will 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 will develop gender sensitive behaviour and become role models to young people from each generation of students they work with currently and in the future.

The school staff and management will feel 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 will develop 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 will feel more connected and supported as they consolidate their GBV prevention strategies together with child protection professionals such as social workers. The 256 students who will work with the trained professionals will feel that their voice is heard and feel more self-confidence and empathy on the short-term. These students will be led through a process of identifying social and gender norms around GBV in their school and community and will start change their behaviours towards their peers.

On the medium term, they will build on positive norms to address harmful norms related to GBV, and will feel empowered to participate at preventing, combating and responding to peer violence through self-developed solutions. They are being 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 become more aware of the phenomena. Simultaneously, around 480 parents of these students will become opened to the influences of gender on their children’s lives through the thematic meetings.

On the long-term, these parents will be 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 see the urgent need to respond firmly to GBV: around 600 stakeholders will participate to the online webinars, the final conference or access 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) will become more aware of the typology of SRGBV, have 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 will be 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 will benefit 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 will be capacitated on the short-term to replicate the project’s results in their own contexts at EU level, based on their specific needs.

The project has been working on thematic packages, i.e. collected and created knowledge materials for professionals. You can see these packages in the links below.

1. Best practices for the prevention of gender-based violence in schools

2. Increasing disclosure of gender-based violence in schools: safe environments promoting a culture of disclosure 

3.   Lived experience and impact on mental health of school-related gender-based violence on survivors