The talks of the Master Plan for Coexistence and Improvement of Security in Educational Centers and their Environments that are being developed from the Provincial Directorate of the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports (MEFPyD) that are taught from the Coordination Unit Against Violence Against Women of the Government Delegation in Melilla began yesterday, Monday.
The Master Plan covers different contents, one of its objectives being the prevention of behaviours of discrimination based on sex or sexual discrimination and the prevention of gender violence.
These training courses are aimed at fourth-year students from ESO, vocational training and training cycles and will be held between February, March and April in all the centres of the city, holding workshops in some 40 groups.
This Monday they started in the ‘Miguel Fernández’ and during this week this training will also be given in the IES ‘Juan Antonio Fernández’, the IES ‘Rusadir’, the ‘Virgen de la Victoria’, the ‘Leopoldo Queipo’ and the ‘Enrique Nieto’.
These workshops, developed by the head of the Unit, Laura Segura, work on the prevention of gender violence, aimed at these ages, being fundamental that the students are able to perceive the uniqueness of this violence and understand that the origin is in machismo and inequality. “It’s about explaining to them that gender violence is on the cusp, but there are other violence that are normalized,” Segura explained.
The goal is for this students to be able to recognize the first signs of violence and, in this way, prevent future violent behaviors and in turn detect those that may already be occurring.
“Another of the main objectives of this plan is to increase the prevention of risks associated with new digital technologies or cyberbullying, since social networks and digital services introduce new forms of gender violence,” he explained.
In short, among the main contents, they are providing general information to adolescents about gender violence, digital gender violence or gender cyberviolence, trafficking and exploitation of human beings and prevention of sexual crimes. At the same time, it aims to promote values of respect, tolerance and equality between women and men, as well as to encourage the filing of complaints in cases of sexual and gender violence.
“The students in these workshops are very participative and show a lot of interest, creating a space for change and awareness that is so important in these ages; and at the same time it is intended that, with the work that is done in these talks, the students act as a motor of transformation in their environments,” he said.
In the words of Segura, “it is intended to work on the eradication of inequality and make visible what is happening in our society and continue to raise awareness of the importance of perceiving this reality as one of the great problems to face and eradicate at the present time”.
Youth violence increases
“The data indicate that there is an increase in gender violence at younger ages, especially manifested in violence of control, and it is fundamental therefore to make pedagogy of nonviolence,” said Segura, who has opted for young women to recognize the first signs of control: clothing, friendships, mobile, isolation… and “that they are able to break with relationships that deprive them of freedom or do not make them feel good.”
According to the 2019 Macrosurvey on Violence against Women, 6.2% of adolescents aged 16 and 17 have suffered physical violence from partners or ex-partners, 6.5% sexual violence, 16.7% emotional violence and 24.9% psychological or control violence.
And the results of the 2020 study “The situation of violence against women in adolescence in Spain”, carried out on a sample of 13,267 adolescents aged 14 to 20 years, reflect that the situations of gender violence in the context of the couple that a greater percentage of adolescent girls acknowledge having lived, once or more often, are those of emotional abuse (“insulting or ridiculing”, by 17.3%), general abusive control (“decide for me to the smallest detail”, by 17.1%) and control through the mobile (by 14.9%).
11.1% acknowledge that they have “felt pressured for sexual situations in which they did not want to participate”, 9.6% that have made them “feel afraid”, 8.7% that they have told them that “it was worthless” and 8% that the boy who mistreated them “presumed such behaviors”.
Regarding sexual violence, the data from the study show that 14.1% of adolescent girls acknowledge that they have felt pressured for sexual activities in which they did not want to participate.
Online sexual harassment of teenagers has increased significantly in the last decade. The situations that suffer most are those related to showing sexual photographs (48%) or asking for them (43.9%), and 23.4% claim to have received requests for cyber-sex online.
It should be noted that Gender Violence is decreasing in adolescents, especially within the couple. However, it remains and it is necessary to place the emphasis especially on Sexual Violence and, in particular, on online sexual harassment.
“The boys and girls usually show rejection of gender violence, but it is true that they recognize that there are relationships of violence in their environment and do not recognize other more subtle forms of violence,” explained Laura Segura. In the same way that “the guys who exercise it, sometimes they are not aware that they are exercising it,” he said.