Alicante, (EFE).- Institutions and academic centers from nine European countries, including Spain, are participating in a project that analyzes the resources to fight against gender violence and the improvements that would be necessary, under a focus on the which includes the assessments of the victims and the security forces.
One of the main actions of this European project is to train police officers through interactive learning so that they can acquire more knowledge about the problems and needs of women who suffer abuse, in order to offer them better assistance.
In the same way, a chatbot will be developed to inform victims about the ways to obtain help and assistance, in addition to providing them with a telephone number, such as the Police or other first responders, to reduce violence.
On the Spanish side, a multidisciplinary research team from the University of Alicante (UA), headed by the Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health Carmen Vives Cases, and the Department of the Interior of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Mossos d’Esquadra).
Also part of ISEDA, which consists of several phases and is funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program, are entities from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Finland and Bulgaria.
“This is a research and intervention project. In the research part, which is what we are now at, we are mapping the resources for attention at the police and social level, but not only making an inventory of those that each of the countries where we are going to work has, but also analyzing them.” , Vives Cases has indicated in an interview with EFE.
Among other issues, for example, “the extent to which they include women and other groups of victims (children) and attend to social inequalities” is analysed, he pointed out.
“We are also going to carry out a qualitative study in the different countries that are part of the ISEDA project, in which women affected by gender violence, associations and public institutions, professionals and the Police will participate” so that, from their perspectives, “They provide us with an assessment of the available resources and the improvements that would be necessary”, the professor has advanced.
All this information “will help us to define interventions that we already have planned in the project, which have to do, on the one hand, with improving accessibility to the police to file complaints in cases in which women have already find themselves in this situation and, on the other, with improving the training of Security Forces personnel in matters of gender violence and in other aspects that arise in this part of the diagnosis that are relevant”, he said.
An integrated data platform will collect, with the consent of victims, court evidence that will be used to build a legal case and record trends about the nature, frequency and circumstances of events, according to AU sources.
On the other hand, there are some project teams (in which Spain does not participate) that will work on an intervention with abusers to redirect their behavior.
In the final phase of ISEDA, campaigns will be promoted to break with gender stereotypes and raise awareness about non-tolerance of violence with the contributions of the victims, through informative guides, posters and videos aimed at educational centers and society in general. .
“The situation of gender violence is obviously very different in the countries and, above all, the project does not focus only on this problem, on measuring the magnitude and risk factors, but on the availability of resources”, has exposed the professor.
