Abused no more: the project
The core theme of Abused no more (AnM) is developing innovative, youth-led, non formal methods to increase young people’s awareness of their legal rights particularly pertaining to discrimination, exclusion and abuse.
At present, school education in the law and basic rights that would allow young people to lead their lives equally in modern European societies is almost non-existent. However, research supports that when people are given the basic legal knowledge to deal with everyday situations not only they stand a better chance in society, but also avoid consuming public services unnecessarily (IARS, 2010). The question of what make us legally capable becomes particularly timely in the current financial climate where more and more young people are struggling to cope, and the demand for legal advice is ever increasing. For young people, a legal problem – let that be crime or debt related, domestic violence or employment – will have a bigger impact. Starting out in life presents young people with enormous new challenges. Marginalised youth are even less likely to receive help or want to engage with the system and what is available to the mainstream population.
However, communicating law related information through formal education or training to marginalised youth and those servicing them is not an easy task. International projects (e.g. Street Law, PLENET, Youth Empowerment Project) have shown that to achieve basic legal literacy among the public, including young people, it must be carried out organically and in a user-led fashion. Therefore, in Europe, a gap is identified in the field of training, education and youth that could be filled through the free dissemination of a youth-led programme for service providers and young people with the aim of increasing their legal capability.
The Abused no More (AnM) project will help to bridge this gap by focusing on increasing legal capacity in the areas of gender-based discrimination, exclusion and abuse against some of the most marginalised youth groups and in particular those who tend to be disadvantaged due to their gender and cultural differences (e.g. immigrants, refugees, descendants from immigrant families) and other social obstacles e.g. sexual orientation and ethnicity.
For futher information http://www.abusednomore.org/about-the-project/
