The project ‘Cut All Ties’ is launched to prevent and reduce Gender-Based Violence among youngsters

ABD coordinates the project “Cut All Ties. Innovation to foster critical thinking tackling gender-based violence on youth affective sexual relationships” co-financed by the REC Program of the European Commission and in collaboration with Fondazione Acra and Citibeats, to prevent and reduce gender-based violence among youngsters.

On January 28th and 29th 2021, the three partner entities of the project hold online launch meetings to inaugurate the project and start working in a coordinated way on the main actions and results.

The Cut All Ties project will be carried out until January 2023 and aims to tackle Gender-Based Violence (GBV) through the design, implementation and validation of an effective and innovative ICT gamification methodology pilot, in order to disseminate messages raising awareness, preventing and reducing GBV among youngsters from 15 to 17 years old in 6 institutes in Barcelona, Madrid and Milan.

Needs Assessment

The first EU macro-survey on GBV carried out by the EU Agency FRA in 2014 observed that 13 million women experienced physical violence, 3.7 million suffered sexual violence and 9 million were victims of sexual harassment. In other words, 1 in 3 women experienced GBV by the age of 15 regardless of their socio-economic background or country. Evidence noticed that Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) among adults begins in adolescence and moreover according to the FRA 2014 survey, 67% of girls/women did not report serious incidents of IPV.

In view of this situation, the project Cut All Ties focuses on Intimate Partner Violence, with the aim of preventing and eradicating it from youth.

Activities

The main activities of the Cut All Ties project are:

• Research among the partner countries (Italy and Spain) to identify EU best practices.
• 200.000 data collection through the creation of a Transnational Artificial Intelligence text analytics platform to identify anonymously pressing social problems of youngsters and citizens of Barcelona, Madrid and Milan related to GBV issues.
• Participatory design of a Capacity-Building Training (CBT) to support preventing and identifying GBV in youth early affective-sexual relationships, involving 120 student‘s families from 6 high- schools.
• Test and validate the C-BT in the different high-schools, training 120 youngsters and 120 teachers.
• 240 awareness actions developed by youngsters to prevent GBV in youth sexual-affective relationships through the The Social Coin methodology, a chain of actions with a social impact.
• Practical Impact Evaluation of the effectiveness of the pilot in changing social norms/behaviours in order to develop policy recommendations.
• National and European dissemination campaigns (online and offline) in order to develop the project results.

Expected impact

The main expected results and impacts of the project are:

• Reduction of 10% on attitudes and behaviours that undermine gender equality in sexual-affective relationships of youngsters.
• Increase of 20% on knowledge to identify escalation of GBV against girls.
• Increase in the knowledge about resources supporting GBV victims.
• 120 students benefit from the Capacity-building Training, become aware of GBV issues and develop into agents of change.
• 120 teachers increase their educational tools to prevent and identify GBV issues among their students.
• 30 stakeholders agree to capitalize and scale-up the project‘s results.