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Seminar in Palermo - June 2008 - |
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The idea of the seminar was that the partners of the Peerthink - project and the colleagues from the good practise projects come together and have an exchange about the intersectional peer Violence prevention approach on a theoretical and practical level. The intention was to check – in the case of evaluated projectsun projet est une aventure autour de la lune- if there exist any intersectional approaches and/or methods in the field of social work and Education concerning Violence prevention.
After the evaluation of the good practice examples of each country it was already quite clear that the concept of Intersectionality is not very common in the field of practical social work and education. It is even often not known as a theoretical concept. Another result of the evaluation was that even where the concept is not known on the practical level of work, it is appreciated to reflect and include the multidimensional aspects of the lifes of the young people. The life of Youth is determined at least by Gender, social Class and Ethnicity.
Because of the differently shaped historical developments of the countries the way to deal with diversity in youth is very different. In France, for instance, by political tradition they do not consider ethnicity as social differentiating criteria, even where it is obvious that there is ethnic discrimination. In other countries they work with this categorial differentiation a lot like in Germany. In Slovenia nationality and gender appear to be invisible, unpleasant topics, and are as a rule not perceived as “official” topics. School experts admit that on these extremely disputable ideological issues consensus is difficult to be reached, therefore it is easier to treat them “salient”, with “flexibility” and “individual approach”.
Italy has a very special form of violence that emerges from the history of the mafia in Italy. And last but not least Austria chose the very interesting and special example of empowerment of young black men in their society.
Beyond the local differences the other is between the fields of work divided into social work and extracurricular education. One of the Austrian projects (N.I.K.I., Graz) is an outreach project with parts of community-work; the other is an extracurricular anti-racist approach (ZARA, Wien), and the Italian project (CE.S.I.E) foots in community work in and around Palermo, but extracurricular education is part of their work. The German project is a very extracurricular project with a gender reflecting and anti-racist focus. And the Slovenian project DKN (Ljubljana) is extracurricular education in Non Violent Communication. The Non Violent Communication seminars are performed in school. That is different from the other educational projects which do the seminars outside of school.
The invited practitioners showed a big interest in getting some new in puts on the theoretical level to see what helps to cope with the complex world of the youth. They have to deal with very different influences the young peoples are living in.
The project partners of the Peerthink project expected a big step to develop and improve an intersectional approach of violence prevention based on practical experiences.
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