Peer violence, both online and offline, often impacts vulnerable individuals who are at risk for discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender, physical or cognitive vulnerabilities and origin. Violence – including youth violence – can take on many different forms such as physical, verbal, psychological and sexual.
With a view to offering awareness-raising and skill-strengthening activities to students, teachers and school staff, ActionAid is launching “Youth For Love Italia” in collaboration with the Istituto Buddista Italiano Soka Gakkai. This project will take place during one school year in middle schools and high schools in Calabria, Lazio, Lombardy and Sicily. It adopts the “Whole School Approach”, which aims at strengthening participation in schools to improve students’ health and well-being by underlying the responsibility of every individual member of the educating and school community. Thus, more than 300 students and 100 teachers and representatives of institutions will be called upon to learn new ways and strategies to face, manage and prevent youth violence. Students will experience participative environments and learning methods and will strengthen their individual competences.
According to the WHO, youth violence is an important public health issue. According to data from the ELISA platform, which is a monitoring tool funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and University (MIUR), in 2021-22, 22.3% of students said they had been subjected to bullying while 18.2% actively participated in bullying a schoolmate. 8.4% of students have been a victim of cyberbullying. 7% have been abused because of their ethnic background, 6.4% because of homophobic reasons, 5.4% because of their disability.
“For the most part, these phenomena don’t emerge, so schools and teachers are not aware of them. Through “Youth for Love Italia” we take on the challenge of preventing and combating violence in all forms, helping youth and their teachers recognize certain signals and act on the deep roots of discriminatory behavior, bullying and violence in all its forms. The goal is for them to tackle these causes in non-punitive ways that respects the rights and the privacy of each student” says Maria Sole Piccioli who is in charge of Education activities in ActionAid.
“Education is one of the founding values of our organization and plays a fundamental role in our activities. Buddhism sees it as a transformative force that can free people from feelings of powerlessness and discouragement. Education can foster the positive potential within each individual. So we are happy to be able to support such a wide-ranging education action, one that starts with young generations and can contribute to a future with no violence” says Valerio Baci, member of IBISG’s 8×1000 Commission.
“Youth For Love Italia” is being implemented thanks to the 8×1000 funds of the Istituto Buddista Italiano Soka Gakkai. It is inspired by a wider project that ActionAid has been implementing since 2019 through an integrated education program in the high schools of four European countries (Italy, Greece, Belgium and Romania). It aims at: organizing awareness-raising and empowerment activities differentiated by target audience; increasing awareness and competences in order to prevent and combat peer and gender-based violence in schools and communities; laying the groundwork for a co-designing approach at a local level involving both teenagers and the educating community in peer-to-peer action.