“Human Rights Education is an important venue to address violence in school, but it needs to be advanced.” (Mr Singh, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education)

During inspiring two days, recent European and global research in combating violence against children in schools have been shared, e.g. research on cyber-bullying. Moreover, various methodologies, initiatives and good practices, including human rights (HRE) and democratic citizenship education (EDC) to make schools free from violence were presented.

EWC Advisor Caroline Gebara presented the Summer Academy “Democracy at School” – a training initiative which addresses teachers, head teachers and NGO/ parents representative as a concrete example on how to incoperate human rights values and democratic principles into schools.

Conclusions referred to the need to strengthen the link between research, policy and practice in this field, and to increase the knowledge on good practices. Furthermore, the need to place children rights’ and children’s participation at the heart of every school was emphasized.
The conclusions and recommendations will inform the follow-up process to the UN Study on Violence against Children, and feed into the Council of Europe (CoE) Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2012-2015).

Underlined by Ms. Jensdottir (Head of the Children's Rights Policies Division, CoE), the CoE will continue to support all member states in their efforts to tackle violence against children. Schools need to be an empowering and safe environment for all - children, teachers, parents, and the administration. The future strategy of the CoE will focus on the promotion of serious implementation – “existing conventions, recommendations and tools, such as the Violence Reduction Pack, need to reach the community level.”

The meeting was jointly organized by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, The Norwegian Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,the Council of Europe and the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children. The European Wergeland Centre was a co–partner.