ESCAPE - European Street Children Anti-violence Programme and Exchange

ESCAPE project aims to foster a transnational knowledge exchange on peer and street violence evidence-based contrast and prevention practices addressed to street living/working children-adolescent with migration background and or belonging to minorities. The project aims also to define an East-West platform development between mainly "new" and "old" EU Member States to foster transnational strategies for promoting effective programmes to prevent and contrast street and peer violence and risk behaviour related to harmfull lifestyles.

The project is articulated in the following phases:

• work at transnational level, mapping the interventions especially dedicated to children/adolescents (with migration background/belonging to ethnic minorities) living/working in street aimed at preventing and contrasting violence;
• analysis of the set of dimensions useful to evaluate the effectiveness of the programmes on which data have been collected and to suggest the main elements to identificate good practices and to design new interventions;
• first workstream: starting of a process of mutual learning between staffs in order to exchange their experiences and know how on intervention models and to share information useful to define guidelines for a transnational strategy of cooperation between staff of Eastern and Western European countries to enforce the effectiveness of intervention practices addressed to street children/adolescents with migration background and/or belonging to minorities;
• designing of a life-skills based programme to contrast and prevent street and peer violence and to define the related tools for the programme effectiveness monitoring and impact assessment;
• developing and evaluation of the prevention programme in seven different local area and in six national contexts (Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Poland);
• validation of the toolkit through interviews and on-line meetings with international experts.

The main deliverable of the project will be a multilingual guide, published (with a CD rom enclosed) in 3100 copies that will offer to staffs or other key-figures working with street children and on the specific problematic of peer and street violence tested monitoring and assessing tools to implement an effective violence prevention programme. In order to ensure an appropriate and diffuse apply of the Guide the ESCAPE project will organize, during the dissemination phase seven national training seminars addressed to pratictioners and other stakeholder involved in the field of violence prevention (400 partecipants are expected). The other final product will be rapresented by guidelines addressed to foster the definition of a transnational cooperation strategy between european staff working on the target issue.