In this newsletter, the experience we have chosen to highlight is called “Chama Violeta: um movimento pedagógico para encore crianças e adolescentes a denunciate a violência sexual [Violet Flame: a pedagogical movement to encourage children and adolescents to denounce sexual violence],” developed by students from primary and secondary schools of the Escola Municipal de Ensino Fundamental Saint-Hilaire, located in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
This project aims to raise awareness and take action against situations that children and adolescents —or their classmates— experience while the school context is usually unfavourable to work on, either in prevention or in taking action against violent incidents.
The students developed the project based on friends’ and classmates’ testimonies of sexual violence in their own homes. These accounts deeply shocked them since the school never tackled this problem. The girls teamed up to change this by organizing “storytelling at school,” using indigenous, black and affective literature, to raise awareness about the fight against sexual violence and to discuss the issue in a new light. They have already held meetings in other educational institutions, showing school communities the importance of dialogue to fight against sexual violence, and also aiming to reduce absenteeism and school dropout rates. This originated an unprecedented approach to disseminating the problem in the education field.
The project is one of the winners of the “Stories that Transform” Contest in 2024, organized by CLAYSS through its Service-Learning in the Arts programme, geared for institutions all over Latin America.
Link to the winning video [in Portuguese]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut9MZrl1i7g
More information [in Spanish]: https://historiasquetransforman.clayss.org