By Laurence Ligier | Project Leader
Dear donor,
Thanks to your donations, we're happy to inform you that we could start our Youth Advocates' program in France!
What has been done?
In March and April 2022, the CAMELEON team conducted educational workshops in two secondary schools in Aulnay-Sous-Bois (Ile-de-France region). 14 classes, representing 293 students in the 5th grade (12-13 years-old), were able to learn about children's rights.
This is the first step in our Youth Advocates program which aims to mobilize these schools in a process of prevention against violence as well as solidarity, by encouraging the commitment of young people, accompanied by adults.
These workshops allowed students to learn about their rights, to identify different forms of violence (physical, psychological, sexist and sexual, cyber-violence...) and to express themselves on the violence they may have been victims or witnesses of.
The CAMELEON facilitators were able to get the children thinking and debating in a fun way with situation cards, quizzes and post-it clouds. The pupils talked about many "ordinary" forms of violence they experience in middle-school, such as mockery and insults, discrimination between girls and boys, racism, and issues with "nudes " on social networks.
What are the next steps?
As a result of these workshops, we will select around 15 youth advocates to lead actions on the rights of the child, to do peer-to-peer prevention and to develop citizen and solidarity projects in their school and neighborhood. These youth advocates will be trained between May and June 2022, notably on psychosocial skills, conflict management and public speaking. Adult referees (teachers or school staff) will also be trained to accompany them.
The gathering of testimonies from pupils on their views and experiences has also made it possible to initiate an assessment of violence in these schools, which has been shared with the management and educational teams.
Launched in 2022, our Youth Advocates program will be deployed for several years in these middle schools, also in connection with the local elementary school, in order to better measure the impact of our project on the territory.
If you wish to further support our actions in France, you can visit our project Combating violence against children in France - GlobalGiving
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