“Boys have to be strong and love playing soccer while girls should be kind and look after their babies”
Is that true? Not for us!
Gender stereotypes negatively affect our life and create different or often opposite ways for being male and female.
Within our societies, gender norms are passed on to children through media, advertisements, toys and even by their parents. From an early age, both boys and girls are encouraged to behave, play and look according to a rigid code of conduct that reduce the opportunities to express themselves.
Since we are surrounded by gender-stereotyped messages, we get used to it. As a matter of fact, they became “normal” and socially accepted. Given that, it’s worth noting that these stereotypes could be deeply related with gender-based violence (GBV) within our communities and thus extremely harmful.
On 2nd December 2019 from 9.00 to 14.00, CESIE organized the Final Conference of the project SAFER – Systematic Approaches for Equality of gendeR at the Ex Chiesa dei Crociferi in order to talk about GBV together with psychologist, teachers and students. Throughout the Conference, “Gender education: preventing gender-based violence from a young age”, we have discussed about key concepts such as sexual orientation, gender identity, stereotypes and the social construction of our biological sex.
In this regard, the conference provided an opportunity to raise awareness among students and teachers on GBV. Demystifying false-myths and prejudices, they discovered how our social and cultural set of beliefs and norms pose limits and affect our behavior, shaping and defining our gender identity.
Even if not limited to the classrooms, teachers play a great role in children’s lives and actually, learning environments could perpetrate socially-constructed gender roles rather than challenging existing attitudes.
Everything that happens at school has a strong educational value, for better or worse. Given that, teaching gender equality to the youngest learners could be a way to debunk gender stereotype diversity and tackle GBV.
The change should start from the bottom and preventing gender-based violence against children at an early stage means building healthy relationships, increasing resilience and personal strength.
About the project
The SAFER – Systematic Approaches for Equality of gendeR project, that is co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Commission, aims to prevent, encourage reporting and combat gender-based violence (GBV) fostering a systematic approach based on positive psychology and character education of children through the development of materials and training of the teachers.
Partners
The project partnership holds together 8 organisations:
- Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family – SPAVO (Cyprus);
- Vilnius University (Lithuania);
- Profexcel.Net Ltd (Ireland);
- Neophytos Ch. Charalambous (Institute of Development) Ltd (Cyprus);
- GRANTXPERT CONSULTING LIMITED (Cyprus);
- Hellenic Association of Positive Psychology (Greece);
- YouAct (United Kingdom);
- CESIE (Italy).
For further information
If you would like to be involved in the activities of the project, or if you would like to receive more information about the project, you can contact Cloé Saint-Nom, cloe.saintnom@cesie.org
