Study Visit to Scotland

A pilot-project in Vienna and our study visit to Scotland

Education is the best prevention of violence!

A transcultural approach.

samara is a child protection agency in Vienna that has been working in the field of prevention of sexual abuse and violence mainly at schools since 1992. In July 2011 we launched a 4-year pilot project:
Transcultural Prevention of Violence and Promotion of Health

The vision of the project is for prevention of violence to become an integral part of child protection regardless of religious, cultural, ethnic, or social background.
The project sees itself as a health-policy measure in the sense of the World Health Organization and the Ottawa-Charter.

The pilot project has been implemented in six primary schools and teachers’ colleges in Vienna. Every child participating in the project will receive thirty-six workshops from 1st to 4th grade. Every parent or guardian is invited to six parent evenings and all the teachers will receive 30 hours of further education. All the participants have access to counselling in the languages German, English, Albanian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Turkish, all relevant languages in Vienna. All 669 schools of Vienna have the possibility to participate in further education free of charge at the two teachers’ colleges of Vienna, which are our project partners. Special teaching materials and a handbook for teachers is being developed. Throughout the project there are interactions with the press and public authorities. The project is being evaluated by a scientific research team throughout the entire four-year period.
Part of the project is to visit good practice models in other European countries: this fall we have visited Bosnia and Herzegovina, Scotland and Sweden.

This project is unique in Europe given the the intensity of the measures, the high quality standards and the ‘multiplier effect’. Many families have a migration background in Vienna. There are prejudices and a lack of understanding between different ethnic groups. Our proactive and transcultural approach is new. The focus of this approach is the equality of different cultures and the possibility of learning from each other. We have already had some success in changes of attitudes and behaviours of mostly socially challenged children and their teachers. We believe that the present and future of many European cities is that the majority of children comes from families with migration background. We think that it is better to accept this reality and create proactive measures to sustain living together respectfully.

Study visit in Scotland

In September 2012 three members of the samara team completed a five-day study trip through Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling). We visited two primary schools, three departments at two universities as well as six social facilities. You can find brief discriptions of the organisations here.  The aim oft the study visit was to find new perspectives in the prevention of violence and to find good practice models.
We would like to share a few impressions from our study trip.

It is a controversial issue in Scotland whether sexual and domestic violence should be discussed openly at schools.
In Scotland very much is invested in primary prevention but much less in the treatment of children and young people who have experienced different forms of violence.

It is more common in Scotland to take “proactive” measures (proactive policy) than in Austria, for instance, to approach schools as an NGO, to contact them and ask: “Would you like help?”
We sense that there is much more coordination and clarity in the system in Scotland than in Austria.

One of the goals was also to intensify international exchange of ideas among experts in Scotland and Austria:
Several teachers from the ‘Castle View Primary School’ in Edinburgh are thinking of coming to Vienna to have direct contact with teachers from our project schools. The concept of the ‘Rights Respecting School’ of the teachers at the ‘Castle View Primary School’ really impressed us. An attempt is made to convince the socially underprivileged parents to support their children’s education. There have been changes to improve behaviour, which is a central factor of this school with its behaviour support teachers. In this school solution-oriented and proactive measures are used in an innovative way. Please find further information of our visit to ‘Castle View Primary School’ here.

samara is very happy that Mr. Brian Donnelly – head of ‘respectme‘ (Scotland’s Anti-Bullying Service) – could be invited to Vienna to the ‘Viennese network against sexual violence against girls, boys and young people’ in April 2013 for a training workshop on the theme of bullying. Scotland’s policy is ahead of Austrian’s policy in this respect.

We visited „Children in Scotland“ in Edinburgh, where Carolyn Roulstoune gave us an interesting overview about the work of schools and NGO’s in accordance with the National Approach to Children Welfare and Violence Prevention.

In January 2013 an article will be published on our project and our study visit in the magazine ‘Children in Scotland’.

We are enthusiastic about our study visit to Scotland. We came back home with lots of inspiration and new ideas for our pilot project in Vienna.

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