Foreword

This book has been made as a part of the Aware-project — “Increasing Awareness in educational Organisations of Sexualised and Gendered Violence -publication and web project 2001–2002”. Articles are based on current and ongoing research made worldwide. The Aware-project is funded by the European Commission’s Daphne-programme. The aim of the whole Daphne-programme is to develop measures to prevent violence targeted at children, youth and women.

The aims of the Aware-project were 1) to increase public and academic awareness of sexualised and gendered violence in educational organisations, 2) to develop communication between existing research networks and 3) to produce a publication, which would be suitable educational material for teacher education pedagogical studies. Our way to prevent violence is to increase administrators’, educators’ and public awareness about various forms of sexualised and gendered violence.

We are proud to publish this book in the Femina Borealis -publication series, which is the publication forum which concentrates especially on Northern Women and Gender Studies. The Aware-project was organised by the Women’s Studies of the University of Oulu, which has been actively developing Women and Gender Studies in the northern part of Europe. The book presents some results of the projects which have roots also in Femina Borealis. Most of the writers of the book are from the northern part of Europe and the book gives some special insights into gendered and sexualised violence in educational environments from a northern perspective as well as comparative insights from other parts of the world.

The book is partly based on work done in various networks and reserach projects. The most important of them are the research project entitled “Gendered power relations and violence in schools and teacher education in Northern Finland”, and the research network entitled “Gendered violence in schools and teacher education in the Barents region”. The network is organised between research groups from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Northwest Russia. Most of the writers come from North and Middle Europe and several of them are working as educators in institutions of higher education and as teachers and psychologists and also crisis centre workers. The project had also a public call for papers, which resulted in a few dozen interesting abstracts. Some of them developed to full grown articles, others have important subjects like trafficking, prostitution and child abuse and may be published in future publications. The call for papers gave us a possibility to find new and future partners in different parts of Eastern Europe like Karelia, Lithuania, Tadzhikistan and Georgia.

Central theme areas of the publication are violence as a part of school culture, representations of femininity, masculinity and body, sexual harassment and coercion, heteronormativity and sexual violence. The themes are intertwined in the articles.

The Aware-project participated in organising two seminars, the NCRB closing seminar “Crisis Centres and Violence against Women”, Oulu, in which Aware-project had a special workshop “Sexism, Sexual Harassment and Anti-Sexist Pedagogy” and the theme seminar “Culture, Violence and Gender — Dialogue between Africa and the Arctic” held in Oulu together with the NCRB-project and the Gender & Violence network.

The project was presented in several international conferences, for example NERA-Congress 2002 “Education and Cultural Diversities” in Tallinn, Estonia; Gender & Violence Research Network meeting in Umeå, Sweden; Farväl heteronormativitet -conference, Göteborg, Sweden; GLEE (Gay & Lesbian Equality in Education) Leadership Training Course, Oulu; 27th ATEE Annual Conference: “Teacher Education and Educational reform” Warsaw, Poland; IV Barents Rainbow Festival & Conference, Oulu. The publication will be published in a conference in University of Umeå, Sweden. The seminars and conferences have provided a special possibility to build networks worldwide.

The staff of Aware-project also organised lectures “The myths, mysteries and misinterpretations of sexuality and sexuality education”, which was especially aimed at the students studying education and teaching. Some writers of this book gave lectures and presented their current research.

During the Aware-project there has been a need and also a possibility for societal activism in addition to academic work. The workers and writers have attended in public demonstrations against violence, coordinating and participating in the Finnish national Women’s Line phone service in Oulu, a help line for girls and women who are facing violence or the threat of violence and urging the local newspaper Kaleva to quit publishing sexual service ads by threatening to boycott the newspaper.