For those not based in or familiar with the landscape of Wales, we have a government that pledged they were working towards Wales being the safest place to be a woman in the world. Clearly, we are wholeheartedly behind this at OSN and wanted to break down how we view our projects fitting in with the Strategy on Violence Against Women.
We see ourselves within Our Schools Now Cymru as actively working towards the success of Objectives 1, 2 and 4 within the government’s strategy.
Objective 1: Challenge the public attitude to violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence across the Welsh population through awareness raising and space for public discussion with the aim to decrease its occurrence.
Our training sessions for staff are explicitly designed to bring both awareness to the research and issues around PSH and allow for a space for staff to discuss and figure out how they can better deal with it in their learning environments. We find that people so often view violence against women as physical attacks and don’t think about the culture that exists to enable those attacks. As we’ve said before, schools are a microcosm of society; what is allowed to go unchecked and normalised in schools, such as PSH, creates a perfect breeding ground for future violence against women.
Objective 2: Increase awareness in children, young people and adults of the importance of safe, equal and healthy relationships and empowering them to positive personal choices.
Our Changemaker workshops are all about empowering and enabling our girls and young women to better understand what they experience every day is a) Not ‘normal’, and b) They can be a force to contend with it. At OSN we are absolutely against victim blaming and shaming. We do not believe the responsibility of tackling PSH should lie with girls alone, but we do stan an empowered, articulate, knowledgeable teenage girl. Increasing awareness through our workshops for girls and non binary pupils fits perfectly into Objective 2.
Objective 3: Make early intervention and prevention a priority.
Finally, our schools project really speaks to the importance of tackling intervention and prevention within schools. PSH is an issue that can’t just be ignored or brushed off or excused as ‘boys being boys’. The hard work of schools to tackle the behaviours and beliefs within their learning environments is crucial to the prevention and intervention against misogyny and violence against women. Our facilitators are all specialists at supporting a school through the, sometimes, difficult steps of changing their school culture.
We are proud to be working within schools in Wales and are excited at the steps and changes some schools are already taking to fight the problem of PSH head on.