Baltic Harmony: Building a Gender-Sensitive Violence-Free Educational Environment

ongoing

The project aims to create evidence-based, gender-sensitive, violence-free educational environments, addressing the systemic prevalence of gender-based violence (GBV) and gender stereotypes underlying such prevalence within educational communities in the Baltic states. The joint effort of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian academic, non-governmental and governmental organizations in the project initiative is going to shine the light on the current situation of GBV in educational communities to empower educators with tools for systemic changes in the prevention of GBV and to advocate for systemic improvements in GBV prevention on legislative levels, addressing systemic issues from the root cause of the problem. Through research, training, advocacy, and communication activities, this project will target audiences of educators, policymakers, parents and children (indirectly), and a wider public to mobilize against GBV and enable intervention in violence cases. The research activities include national and international reports exploring practices, obstacles, knowledge gaps, available and missing resources of teachers and other relevant specialists working at schools related to education dealing with gender stereotypes and GBV and intervention in cases of violence. The training activities include training material preparation and implementation: establishing a national network of schools, enabling school communities to react to GBV, and building educators' capacity for GBV prevention in formal education by developing a comprehensive capacity-building training program for teachers and educational support professionals. Advocacy activities will include developing and presenting policy briefs to policy makers for use in drafting/proposing amendments and to continue advocating for change in GBV prevention. Communication and dissemination activities will include targeted communication actions toward educators and national social communication campaigns.