During the school year 2011-2012, EAVN implemented 4 Experiential Workshops “Youth4Youth” (total duration: 34 teaching hours) with 87 students of secondary education (35 boys and 52 girls) in 3 Lyceums in Attica, which were implemented in the framework of the project “Youth4Youth: Empowering Young People in Preventing Gender-based Violence through Peer Education” (with financial support of the DAPHNE III Programme of the European Union).  

Sixty-one students (23 boys and 38 girls) -out of the 87 students who were sensitized on Gender-based Violence and trained on the peer education methodology- acted as “peer educators” and implemented 28 “Youth4Youth” Workshops (total duration: 33 teaching hours), which resulted to the sensitization of 435 students in the 3 Lyceums.

The workshops’ aim was to provide adolescents with a safe space to: 

  • explore their attitudes towards gender-based violence, 
  • explore how gender stereotypes and gender inequality are related to gender-based violence, 
  • challenge attitudes of tolerance towards gender-based violence, 
  • empower them to resist gender-based violence and develop attitudes of self-respect and self-value, 
  • further develop and promote the “peer education” methodology to preventing gender-based violence among youth as well as promote their active involvement in developing a safe and protective environment for themselves and their peers
  • promote the development of critical thinking among young people towards important actors of youth gender socialization, particularly electronic and other media. 

The experiential “Youth4Youth” Workshops were organized, implemented and evaluated according to the methodology and activities described in detail in the “Manual for Empowering young people in preventing gender-based violence through peer education”, which is the training material that was developed in the context of “Youth4Youth” project. 

At the end of the “Youth4Youth” Awareness Raising Workshops, the products of adolescents that resulted from each workshop were exhibited at schools. In one Lyceum, the products’ exhibition is permanent while in the other two schools the exhibitions’ duration lasted one week approximately. The organization of these exhibitions aimed at the celebration of adolescents’ participation in the workshops and further sensitization of the entire school community (peers, teachers, parents) because the products depicted the teens’ attitudes towards combating of GBV (materials that resulted from the experiential activities and posters with teen’s slogans against gender-based violence.  

According to the evaluation results of “Youth4Youth” Workshops, students were highly satisfied with their participation in the workshops, while the vast majority of students replied that they would recommend to a friend of theirs to participate in a workshop like this (95.9%) and they would like to participate again in a similar workshop in the future (90.3%). In addition, 94.5% of students believes that these kinds of workshops should be carried out in the school setting and 87.5% of students expressed their willingness to act again as peer educator on GBV awareness raising activities.

Overall, the workshops seemed to highly contribute to the obtainment of new knowledge by participants, as the total mean ratings in all assessed aspects ranged from 67.5% to 77.9%. The influence of workshops

were higher, as assessed by students themselves, in the aspects of recognizing their own relationships (77.9%) and behaviors (75.1%) as healthy or unhealthy, as well as in the aspect of gaining the basic knowledge related to what they should do if themselves or somebody else is being abused (70.6%). Comparatively lower but also to a great extent seemed to be workshops’ influence in the aspects of recognizing incidences of gender based violence (69%) and enhancing students’ knowledge in the topics of gender stereotypes and gender based violence (67.5%). What is of importance to be highlighted here is that after the workshops, participants felt more ready and more capable to take action against incidences of gender based violence by 68.1%; suggesting that the workshops had considerable effect not only in a theoretical level, by obtaining new knowledge, but also in a practical level. 

More information and the detailed results of the implementation and evaluation of “Youth4Youth” Workshops in Greece are available on the Project’s Coordinator website in English. In addition, there are available (in English) the reports of workshops implemented in Cyprus, Italy, Spain and Lithuania.