Beyond #MeToo, Youth-workers, Young People and the wider community making a positive change around gender based violence (GBV).

The project brought together two communities in Glasgow and Reykjavik to help make the comprehensive and lasting change in attitudes, behaviours and relationships surrounding GBV prevention work, that are needed. We were looking to opening a dialogue and exploring GBV from both a theoretical and practical perspective. We consider this project to be a catalysts for a culture change within both communities; with community partnerships, public consciousness on the issue and political willingness all in place to ensure that this will be successful and sustainable.

Content was created: for youth themselves to strengthen their ability to become peer educators, for a university course taught at the University of Iceland with a theoretical approach and for practical learning among youth workers in online seminars

This work was based on the learning obtained during a previous Erasmus+ KA2 project, where we made a toolkit for youth workers which supported them when discussing gender-based violence prevention with young people. Throughout that process, we found that youth workers were calling for a lot more support and knowledge in dealing with GBV in their setting. We began our partnership work at the start of the #metoo movement which resulted in a lot of community members finding this subject extremely topical and relevant and many were just realizing the scope of GBV issues in the community. Following that, we decided it was important to make this follow up project to provide the additional support youth workers were calling for and to include more partners to reach a wider community.

Objectives

• To increase the confidence of youth workers working in Glasgow and Reykjavik to enable them to implement prevention projects around GBV.
• For young people to have an increased awareness of GBV in their community and be better equipped to participate in positive change.
• To actively deliver and robustly evaluate primary prevention activities in the two communities.
• For there to be a greater working relationship between key stakeholders in the community when talking about GBV.
• To consolidate and share the learning through a curriculum so that youth workers out with the project can learn from the process.