The importance of digital education to enhance intellectual security in Arab societies in light of technological challenges: a forward-looking vision.

The subject of media and digital education in the family and school has become a necessity in the new technological environment, where it has become an important requirement for social upbringing as a process of giving individuals the values, beliefs, norms and social norms that enable them to reconcile and facilitate them in dealing with the problems of their society in the future in a positive way. Among the most prominent problems facing social development now are the problems of the unconscious interaction of children and adolescents with the media, which are exposed to all the content that is destructive to values and morals and that is threatening to public belief and morality. In addition to the lack of opportunities for interaction and communication within the family, children and students today are communicating more with technology than with their families, families and teachers, so that the impact of technology on them is greater than social influences, as a generation that has developed in a rapidly accelerating world. The purpose of this intervention is to provide the right skills to these generations through their education, media and digital education, which will enable them to deal properly with these means, to make good use of them, to avoid their risks, to avoid their implicit messages that rob privacy and generate various forms of violence, crime, and to destroy values and morals. The role of the family and the school is integrated in this field.

Public Understanding of Coercive Control in Northern Ireland

Coercive control is characterised by negative behaviours which intimidate, threaten, and humiliate a person or restrict a person’s liberty. In addition to being a known risk factor for experiencing other forms of violence, research has linked coercive control to symptoms of psychological distress and suicidality. In the UK, coercive and controlling behaviours within intimate and familial relationships have been legislated as offending behaviours. However, there still exists a lack of international evidence on wider public knowledge and understanding of coercive control. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT) is an annual cross-sectional representative survey of social policy topics. Participants are adults aged 18 years or over. Concerning coercive control, respondents were presented with two relationship scenarios: obvious and less obvious coercive control. Following each scenario, respondents indicated their level of agreement to ten statements covering attitudes towards coercive control, victims of coercive control, talking about coercive control, and whether coercive control is a crime. Respondents indicated whether they had heard of the term ‘coercive control’. Predictors of coercive control awareness were assessed using multinomial logistic regression. Mixed analysis of variance assessed if agreement levels to the ten statements varied by type of coercive control and victim gender. Most respondents said that they had heard of the term coercive control and knew what it meant. Those who had not heard of coercive control at all were more likely to be on a lower income, less qualified and younger, when compared to those who said they knew what the term meant. Significant interactions between coercive control type and victim gender were evident for all ten statements. While most respondents are aware of the term coercive control, a significant number have not and are therefore unlikely to recognise the signs of this type of abuse.

Caregivers’ Perceptions of a Youth-led Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative: A Brief Report

Sexual and related forms of violence among middle and high school students are pervasive public health issues, and thus, there is a growing emphasis on the development and evaluation of sexual violence prevention efforts for youth. Caregivers such as parents are important partners in this work as they can facilitate youths’ involvement (e.g., give them permission to participate, provide instrumental support such as rides), but their perception of their youth’s involvement in sexual violence prevention efforts is largely unexplored. The current paper examined caregivers’ perceptions of their teens’ participation in a community-wide, out-of-school, youth-led sexual violence prevention initiative. Some caregivers of youth who were involved in the initiative ( N = 19; 79.9% White; 21.1% Native American) responded to closed- and open-ended questions about what their teen had talked to them about in relation to the initiative, why their teen participated in the initiative, and how involvement impacted their teen. Furthermore, caregivers who attended events themselves responded to questions about what they learned, what they liked best, and what they liked least. Over half of caregivers said that their teens talked to them about bystander intervention, social emotional skills, and what constitutes sexual violence. Perceptions of the initiative were largely positive both in terms of what the teen learned at part of the programming and in caregivers’ own experience participating. These results are promising for the role of caregivers in partners in prevention.

Play to Learn: Shakespeare games as decolonial praxis in South African schools

The place of Shakespeare in South African secondary education has become highly contested in light of calls to decolonise the English Home Language curriculum through intentional inclusion of indigenous authors and knowledge systems, and the removal of colonial impositions such as Shakespeare. Yet removing Shakespeare from the curriculum is not the only or even the best solution for countering the violent legacies of colonialism and apartheid. This article argues that a more effective decolonial approach would be to change the way Shakespeare is taught in schools by cultivating horizontal, instead of hierarchical, dialogue within classrooms and between secondary educators and Shakespeare scholars. The authors describe their own horizontal collaboration to produce “Blood will have Blood”, a series of lesson plans and assignments centred on scenes of violence in the Shakespeare set works. Using the digital theatre game Play the Knave, the programme engages secondary school students in creative experimentation and embodied play with Shakespeare’s texts. As learners access the curriculum from their own epistemological standpoints and through their own bodies, they come to understand gendered and racial forms of violence represented in the plays and manifested in their personal and historical contexts. The article contextualises the project in terms of Practice as Research (PAR) methodology while offering preliminary findings from the programme’s implementation in Cape Town schools.

Protection of orphans and children left without parental care from violence and abuse: legal grounds and psychological assistance

The paper deals with the problem of abuse and violence against minors, among which the authors distinguish a special category: orphans and children left without parental care. Approaches to the definition and forms of violence and ill-treatment of minors are described. The psychological causes and consequences of violence and ill-treatment are analyzed. Technologies for providing psychological assistance to child victims of violence and abuse are offered. A significant part of the work is devoted to the consideration of the features of interdepartmental interaction on prevention and timely detection of signs and consequences of abuse and violence against children. The result of such an analysis was the development of a model regulation describing the procedural and legal issues of coordinating such interaction between specialists from different departments in order to protect the interests of minors. The work is addressed to psychologists, teachers, specialists of organizations for children.

The Effects of Violence on Communities: The Violence Matrix as a Tool for Advancing More Just Policies

In this essay, I illustrate how discussions of the effects of violence on communities are enhanced by the use of a critical framework that links various microvariables with macro-institutional processes. Drawing upon my work on the issue of violent victimization toward African American women and how conventional justice policies have failed to bring effective remedy in situations of extreme danger and degradation, I argue that a broader conceptual framework is required to fully understand the profound and persistent impact that violence has on individuals embedded in communities that are experiencing the most adverse social injustices. I use my work as a case in point to illustrate how complex community dynamics, ineffective institutional responses, and broader societal forces of systemic violence intersect to further the impact of individual victimization. In the end, I argue that understanding the impact of all forms of violence would be better served by a more intersectional and critical interdisciplinary framework.

Climate Change and Violence in Post-Conflict Colombia

The aim is to explain the link between climate-related issues and violent patterns in Colombia after the 2016 peace agreements. The main premise is that the effects of an erratic climate has an indirect but relevant influence in the emergence of new forms of violence. In other words, the climatic change and environmental degradation act as a “stressor” in different forms of violence in this commodity-based economy recovering from more than 50 years of internal armed conflict. The qualitative approach is based on semi-structured interviews with government representatives and academics to track different perspectives. It is argued that key environmental and climate-related issues in new forms of conflict after the peace deal are linked to the fragmentary distribution and control of land, the ongoing forced migration patterns, and expansion of a new and more lucrative illicit economy.

Article 19: The Right to Protection from All Forms of Violence

Article 19 defines violence broadly to include all forms of harm, encompassing physical, mental and sexual violence as well as non-intentional forms of harm, such as neglect. As such, Article 19 articulates full respect for the human dignity and physical and personal integrity of children as rights-bearing individuals. This requires a paradigm shift of caregiving and protection away from the perception of children primarily as victims. Article 19 sets out a comprehensive prohibition on all forms of violence towards children and enjoins State Parties to take all form all measures available to enforce this right. This article summarizes the four main attributes of Article 19 as follows: (1) All violence towards children is prohibited, frequency or severity of harm need not be demonstrated and violence is defined broadly to encompass all forms of violence towards children, personal, social and institutional, including physical and emotional harm as well as neglect, maltreatment, sexual abuse, and abandonment; (2) the right protects children from harm from their parents and legal guardians as well as when they are in the care of proxy caregivers, including school officials, hospital staff, daycares, sports programs, as well as custodial settings and alternative care arrangements; (3) States are required to give effect to this right through all appropriate measures: legislative, administrative, social and educational; and finally the call for comprehensive measures to eradicate violence against children is reinforced by the final attribute (4) this attribute insists that the range of interventions required to give effect to Article 19 rights includes measures to ensure effective identification, reporting, investigation, and treatment of all forms of harm to children.

Structural Violence among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPS) Within Idp Settlements in Mogadishu Somalia

Background: Gender based violence (GBV) remains a public health concern. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees have been shown to be at the highest risk of gender based violence. Somalia has been without a stable government for 26 years resulting in weak community and formal protection structures hence disproportionately increasing the vulnerability of females to gender based violence. Continued displacement of community members in South Central Somalia due to war, inters clan conflicts and the ongoing drought has resulted in more IDPs living in settlements along major urban areas. These IDPs continue to face violations such as forced evictions, discrimination and gender based violence. Objective: This study was aimed at investigating the past and present forms of structural violence faced by IDPs in Mogadishu as well as their knowledge and perceptions regarding the same. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional design was used in this study, in the month of May 2017. The study population for this survey was 320 IDPs in 10 IDP settlements in KM-11 and KM-13 regions of Mogadishu, South Central Somalia. Results: The study established a 91.7% prevalence rate of female genital mutilation among the female respondents. World Health Organization (W.H.O.) type III was the most common form of FGM that female respondents in the two IDP settlements (38.9%) had faced, followed by W.HO. type 4 (23.1%) and W.H.O. type I and II (15.9%). The mean age at which FGM was carried out among this group was 7 years while forced and early marriages (mean of 16 years) are common among this population group. Sexual assault and rape were singled out as the most common forms of violence faced by females in the two IDP settlements with the risk factors for this violence being described as displacement, overcrowding in IDP settlements, poor lighting in the IDP settlements at night, unaccompanied females in the IDP settlements and female headed households. Respondents expressed their overwhelming preference for community protection structures in averting GBV and customary law in arbitrating gender based violence cases. There was low awareness on services available for GBV survivors and so was the knowledge on the urgency to seek medical services within the 72 hours window period following rape. Conclusion: The study has established that structural violence is common among IDPs living in Mogadishu and it is constraining them from achieving the quality of life that would have otherwise been possible if they were not displaced. There is need to strengthen both community and formal protection units as well as raise awareness regarding the effects of the various forms of violence facing female IDPs, create awareness regarding services available for GBV survivors and ensure that these services are available and accessible to the IDPs

Co-Occurrence of Violence on the Severity of Abuse in Intimate Relationships

Several empirical studies have shown that women who experience violence in intimate personal relationships (IPV) commonly experience more than one form of violence. While it is recognized that individual trajectories of IPV vary over time, little is known about the temporal dynamics of this co-occurrence or its consequences. This study describes the different forms of violence experienced by women and looks at whether it is possible to predict when severe violence (physical and sexual) is most likely to occur. Data in the study comes from interviews with 70 women who had been victims of intimate partner violence. The life history calendar method was used to facilitate identifying kinds and levels of violence and the month in which violence took place. Individual victimization trajectories were found to be heterogenous and likely to change in the short term. The women in our sample experienced more than one form of intimate partner violence and co-occurrence of different forms of violence was common in individual trajectories. The characteristics of the kind of violence experienced were important in understanding the temporal aspects of acts of severe violence. The increased knowledge about patterns of violence provided by these results should help to develop better ways to intervene to prevent such events.