Youth For Love 2 – Youth against Peer Violence

The project develops an integrated educational program for youth, school staff and families based on the whole school approach to understand and identify peer violence, acquire skills to deal with it and rethink procedures and mechanisms of prevention and management wtihin and outside the school. The activities involve the stakeholders of the educational community in co-designing actions at local level; at national level a participatory process will be promoted to request policy changes to institutions from a youth-led perspective. Finally, the project includes an online game for boys and girls to test themselves and learn how to deal with peer violence and bullying.

The WHO acknowledges peer violence as a major public health issue. Youth violence can take up many forms including physical, verbal, psychological and sexual. Half of the students aged 13–15 declare to have experienced bullying or physical violence. The Council of Europe Strategy on the Rights of the Child 2016-2021 has identified violence prevention as one of the five priority areas to guarantee the promotion of children’s rights. Peer violence is a pervasive phenomenon, exhausted by pandemic limitations, that presents many risk factors that occur at different levels: individual, family and close relationship level and community and society level. As Youth for Love 1 demonstrated, education can play a key role in the prevention of violence: it is quite urgent to strengthen relationships among schools, families and local stakeholders to protect adolescents.