An interview with two young women and their experiences working with young refugee girls. By Gelly Aroni.
Dr Gelly Aroni, co-leader of the four-year Living Democracy campaign, gives here a personal impression she had meeting two engaged young women working for young people and their life in a democracy.
“I met these young women when the implementation of CORE started in Greece in the summer of 2022. The CORE project aims to disseminate the digital teaching tool CORE to promote life skills in Greece. A great combination of a theatre and experiential learning facilitator and a psychologist with expertise in art gave the project a different twist, as using art with young refugees proved to be an excellent means for self-competencies and life skills development. When Dimitra and Magdalena approached me with a proposal to use the booklet “CORE life: teaching life skills as empowerment for girls” (https://ipe-textbooks.phzh.ch/de/life-skills/) to train the staff in the accommodation facilities that host unaccompanied underage girls in the Attica region, I was thrilled to have them on board.
I asked them to have a reflection discussion at the end of the training sessions which turned out to be an interesting, stimulating and thought-provoking interview about democracy and how it is linked to the empowerment of girls!
As they explained to me, the manual was created as an additional guide for teachers and trainers working with CORE, and its aim is to pay special attention to empowering girls. It was written with a focus on young girls and women who have experienced trauma, lack of social networks and displacement who are trying to cope with physical, material, and emotional insecurities and anxieties. Therefore, its content primarily aims to create safe spaces and make room to slowly explore topics that are highly sensitive and possibly triggering to them. To gradually regain self-esteem and trust, the booklet combines approaches from somatic and arts therapy, visualisation techniques and co-constructive processes of learning.
During our discussion, I had the opportunity to ask the young facilitators how this very individualised, private and personal experience of empowerment can contribute to collective societal growth for more just, inclusive and democratic societies.
According to Dimitra, “to speak of a democratic culture in a country, among other things we need to make clear that all its members enjoy equal opportunities and equal rights. Displaced young girls and women are often victims of gender-based discrimination and violence. To diminish the phenomenon, we need to mediate through education empowering girls and women by exploring and recognising gender-based discrimination, by raising awareness around the topic of gender equality and by creating safe spaces to explore topics that are highly sensitive”.
Magdalena, supporting this opinion, added that “democracy is closely linked to girls’ and women’s empowerment in a society in several ways. By ensuring the equal representation and participation of women in the process of decision making, the resulting practices and policies of a country create a much more inclusive, enriched and diverse society. This also contributes to the fundamental aspects of social progress and human rights, which are extremely important to keep a democracy aligned with its initial principles. By reducing gender discrimination and disparities, a culture of respect, fairness and equality is fostered which in turn generates a much more representative democratic culture. Empowering women and young girls around the world should not only be a responsibility of a democracy, but a condition for it to call itself one as well”.
All three of us agreed that education not only in formal but in unformal settings like in the case of projects like CORE has a transformative power that nurtures empowerment and democracy. This is especially true for young refugee girls who have often been deprived of this fundamental right.
Working on projects like this has a transformative power for facilitators as well. When asked to comment on this, Magdalena said that “by focusing on the development of self-competencies and life skills, I was able to engage with youth populations with refugee experience in creative and meaningful ways. I felt the need to consciously strive to align my efforts both with democratic ideals and human rights, especially those related to education. I became a more competent facilitator in the use of child-centric, inclusive approaches to ensure that all participants were empowered and provided with tools and strategies to help them participate actively in society. I evolved as a trainer myself and I realised that, when working with marginalised groups, the effort and commitment which is put in extends beyond exercises and activities: it is about creating a sense of agency and a safe space in which ideas and feelings can be discovered and expressed”.
Dimitra, on the other hand, brought another dimension into the discussion when she specifically referred to how she further developed her own competences for a democratic culture through this work. She especially referred to the skills of listening and observing, as well as these of flexibility and adaptability. In her own words: “I found out that we often approach the training sessions with a “Western” perspective, having prepared the sessions based on our own realities and cultural interpretations of the world. When working with young refugee girls, though, you learn to be a more observant and active, attentive listener in order to be better equipped to adapt the activities and the materials to their own learning needs and cultural specificities”.
For me, I see the sustainability of all projects in these two young women. When learners are actively engaged, either as facilitators or participants, their levels of mastering competences for democratic culture advance and together with this so does democracy.”
This wonderful example shows how trainers and mentors experience their own personal development through their further training, but above all through their direct work.
