"Hope For Children" CRC Policy Center organised and supported the CONVEY Pilot Programme for 42 young students within the frame of the EU co-financed project “CONVEY – Counteracting sexual violence and harassment: Engaging Youth in schools in digital education on gender stereotyping”. The workshops took place on March and April 2019. CONVEY project was developed by six EU project partners including CESIE (Italy), “Hope For Children” CRC Policy Center (Cyprus), Gender Alternatives Foundation (Bulgaria), The Smile of the Child (Greece), Sexual Violence Centre Cork (Ireland) and the Westminster City Council (UK).
The CONVEY educational workshops aimed to support the students to make informed decisions and develop better coping mechanisms, contributing to the prevention of violence which is linked to gender stereotyping and sexualisation of females in the media and new technologies.
The participants had the opportunity to engage with the programme as players in the CONVEY Not A Game (https://notagame.eu/), the “point-and-click” game designed within a strong investigation style. Across the 5 chapters of the game, through mini-games, flashbacks and videos based on real testimonies of violence survivors, the students become the detective looking for the responsible person for the crimes committed against a child, a girl, a woman and a student.
The Pilot Programme was implemented at Ayios Ioannis Chrysostomos High school in Nicosia. 22 students attended the program together with the school counsellor Patricia Phaedonos of the Cyprus Observatory on School Violence of the Ministry of Education and Culture and Anna Charalambous, the educational counsellor of “Hope For Children” CRC Policy Center. The workshop was also implemented at Zakaki Gymnasium in Limassol, with the participation of 20 students. The Pilot Programme was implemented by schools counsellors Christiana Christodoulou and Melina Dimitriou of the Violence Immediate Intervention Team (MoEC). All workshops have been conducted in a group work format, in a safe and protective environment where the young students were encouraged to share their experiences, supporting a peer to peer learning approach. The Organization would like to thank the Ministry of Education and Culture for their support and cooperation for conducting the workshops in Nicosia and Limassol. The support and guidance of school counsellors was essential to the implementation of this program.
For more information about the CONVEY project, available training materials and the game, you can contact Anca Clivet, Coordinator of the Education, Awareness & Capacity Building Unit at clivet.a@uncrcpc.org.