Our Show Respect campaign to tackle violence against women and girls was boosted on Wednesday as the Youth Endowment Fund, a charity that seeks to reduce violence for young people, backed our initiative with £368,000, taking the total committed to £868,000.
The money will fund the STOP project, a relationship violence prevention programme to be delivered in up to five schools by teachers specially trained by the Sex Education Forum. It will begin in September and is being co-ordinated by the Ending Youth Violence Lab.
The project is part-funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, the Bridges Impact Foundation and philanthropist Stuart Roden, and will be evaluated by Exeter University to gather more evidence about this type of intervention in a British setting.
This week we announced that £500,000 from the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund would be deployed to fund 12 charities to run healthy relationships workshops in schools in low-income neighbourhoods. It is projected to reach more than 15,000 teenagers over two years.
This commitment from the Youth Endowment Fund draws on two well established approaches — Shifting Boundaries, a US intervention with classroom elements which has been shown to reduce gender-based violence, and Learning Together, which uses student-staff groups to develop a school-wide approach.
Youth Endowment Fund chief Jon Yates said: “We are delighted to be joining the Evening Standard’s Show Respect campaign. These workshops help our children to build social and emotional skills to tackle misogyny, sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Evidence from the US shows that they reduce violence against girls by 17 per cent. One of the key aims of the STOP project is to run a study to test if the intervention works here and could progress to a larger scale.”
London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan said the Evening Standard’s new Show Respect campaign was “vitally important” in the wake of the unsettling findings of our special investigation which revealed boys as young as eight accessing porn and that misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has had a big influence on boys.
Backing also came from broadcaster and author June Sarpong who said: “It is brilliant that the Standard is helping tackle the growing misogyny we see against girls in schools. It is important we work to counter the dangerous social media narrative that many young people, especially boys are being exposed to.”
