The conference opened with a screening of "Girl rising", a movie covering personal stories of nine girls from nine different countries: Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Peru, Egypt, Nepal, India and Cambodia. This film, a unique mix of documentary and drama, showcased how education helped the main characters cope with poverty and harsh life circumstances. The film screening attracted more than 200 viewers. Having watched the film, Maria from Ulyanovsk and Fariza from Grozny shared their impressions with the audience. They tried to draw parallels and discover similarities between the stories of the girls from the movie and their own, and it appeared that their life stories had a lot in common, and they encountered similar hardships on the way to their dreams.

On 21 September the conference continued with two workshops organised specifically for those who work in crisis centres, specialists on gender violence prevention, activists, psychologists and psychotherapists, as well as the media representatives covering the problem of gender violence.

Inna Ayrapetyan, “Sintem” social and psychological resource center (Chechnya, Russia), Nadezhda Zamotayeva, “Sisters” Relief Center for Sexual Abuse (Russia), Oria Gargano, Befree - organization combating violence, discrimination and human trafficking (Italy), and Brigitte Broux, director of the “SOS Femmes 93” (France) talked about the system of protective orders for victims of violence (taking the experiences of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal as examples), psychological protection, public projects and campaigns, as well as laws and avenues for state participation in solving the most acute problems of gender-based violence in the EU and Russia.         

Svetlana Anokhina, "Fathers and Daughters" (Dagestan, Russia), Andrey Kolpakov, M21, Consulting center “Alternative to Violence” (Russia), and psychotherapist Olga Klauber (Sweden), talked about their work with men, available intervention programmes, prevention of gender violence, and the role of the media in dealing with discourses of masculinity and aggression during the second workshop titled "Best Practices of Working with Aggressors".

Olga Klauber is a psychotherapist from the MVU clinic in the Swedish city of Uppsala. She studied psychology at Uppsala University and worked with victims of violence in multiple roles and settings, in particular, in the Red Cross clinic for refugees. She now has a rare specialization: she focuses on the abusers rather than the victims. You can learn more about her daily work by reading a colta.ru article published in our section "Bridges".

The conference finished with an evening roundtable discussion "Preventing and Combating Gender Violence". Elena Triffonova, Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (Bulgaria), Anna Rivina, Director of the Centre for Violence Prevention Nasiliu.Net (Stop.Violence) (Russia), and Natalya Khodyreva from the St. Petersburg Women’s Club (Russia) discussed the composition of the gender-based violence risk groups and the factors that put these demographic groups into particular danger, as well as the factors contributing to the growth of violence in society, and the assistance provided to the victims of violence by the state and NGOs. Some 100 people took part in the discussion.