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BREAKING THE SILENCE TOGETHER. Academic success for all by tackling child sexual abuse in primary schools of Europe
Start date: Sep 1, 2016, End date: Aug 31, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The project “Breaking the silence together” is based on the priorities on education of the Europe 2020 strategy, the recommendations of the Council of Europe Convention on the protection children against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse and the results of main academic studies tackling the consequences of child maltreatment. The child sexual abuse is a significant problem in Europe today that affects between 10% and 20% of children from all social and economical classes and in all European countries. The main researches prove the direct consequences on the academic results. The project aims to improve the academic results and overcome the school dropouts in primary schools of Europe by tackling the child sexual abuse as one of the causes. To achieve this objective the project will develop a community prevention programme to tackle the child sexual abuse in the primary schools of Europe based on the internal collaboration among students, educative actors, families and stakeholders. The primary schools students, their families and the primary school teachers, heads and other educational staff will have an active role and will contribute in the development of the main project outputs that will include their needs, inputs, fears and proposals. To involve them, six primary schools from three European countries from the rural and urban context will collaborate with the project consortium by organizing initial trainings addressed to the three main target groups, throughout focus groups aimed to collect their voices and testing all the project outputs during a pilot implementation, where the three target groups will evaluate them at the end. At the beginning of the project the consortium will collect in a report the previous successful experiences already developed in terms of improve the academic results and tackle the child sexual abuse at the same time. This will allow to continue the work done previously and to identify the successful elements. The creation of five Experts Advisory Councils will assure not only the high quality of the project outputs but also its transferability and adequacy. The project will be implemented through a participative and communicative methodology where the project beneficiaries will be involved in the design, testing and evaluation of the project results in equal terms with the experts and the project consortium. The main project results will be: the report Learning from the experience collecting the previous successful experiences; a community prevention programme to tackle the child sexual abuse in primary schools; a teacher’s manual to implement correctly the prevention programme; a pedagogical and training toolkit to tackle the child sexual abuse with primary school students and their families and an awareness raising kit addressed to all the community to make visible the child sexual abuse problem and the consequences on academic results and future occupation. The project will make a step forward by developing concrete tools and resources that can be implemented in any primary school from any European country from any context. The project will raise awareness in the society and specially the scholar community towards the child sexual abuse and its consequences in academic results. Furthermore, the project will provide skills and abilities to children and their families such as empowerment, self-protection and resilience. In addition, it will support teachers and other educational staff with tools and resources to improve the academic results of the students by tackling the child sexual abuse, preventing it, establishing a communicative environment focused on children necessities and reacting adequately towards a possible disclosure. Four national seminars and a European conference addressed to primary school staff and stakeholders will be organized to launch the main project results and assure the impact and sustainability of the project. All the project outputs will be evaluated during the testing phase by the beneficiaries, ensuring the high quality, adequacy and successful implementation after the project finishes the EU funding. The project is totally innovative because most of the projects aimed to tackle the dropout rate and to increase the academic results of children do not take in account the child sexual abuse as one of the possible causes despite the large number of victims in all European countries (10-20% of children) and the empirical evidences showing the direct causality. The project will suppose to break the silence on child sexual abuse in the European primary schools, to tackle it with the involvement of all the community and to increase the academic results of all the students.
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