INTERNATIONAL MEETING UNDER THE EWA PROJECT WAS HELD IN ATHENS
n the period October 11 – 14, 2022, a partner meeting under the EWA project – Empowering Women Athletes: Tackling Feminine Abuse, Violence and Discrimination in EU Sports Clubs was held in Athens, Greece. During the meeting, the partner local training sessions, the prepared training materials (Strategy and tools for the empowerment of female athletes), the established centralized model of the "Help Desk – for Athletes and Women", as well as the crucial role of sports professionals in combating abuse, violence and discrimination against women, were discussed.
Sport is a means of self-expression and fulfilment, as well as a force for citizenship and solidarity, while stressing how violence against women, stereotyping, differences in payment and barriers to women’s involvement in management are still problems tackling the sport sector.
Those barriers act on multiple levels (verbal, physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, social, cultural, organisational, economic, mediatic, etc.) and are collectively perceived as a pervasive chauvinist culture that permeates the career of any female athlete.
The project aims to counter abuse, violence and harassment against female athletes in EU Sports Clubs through a comprehensive approach that collects past and present efforts and forces against the problem in order to power up the overall sports management systems to take charge of it.
The innovative aspect of the project lies in the attempt to strengthen the commitment of all individual beneficiaries by taking on the problem and supporting each other.
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
• Catalyze social players and communities in Europe that already dealt with the issue around a comprehensive dialogue on the state of the art and next steps to take;
• Promote and innovative and multi-layered response to the problem tackled, maximizing and building on past experiences and creating new strategies and tools at EU level;
• Activate beneficiaries in Europe through a grass-roots awareness-rising campaign aiming at acknowledging and valorizing the role of women in sports;
• Produce and disseminate counter-narratives on women in sports though a social-media campaign;
• Test and assess a training and awareness raising campaign addressed to AERS (Ambassadors of Equal Rights in Sports) and sports professionals (coaches, tutors, managers, etc.);
• Experiment a peer-to-peer support system to encourage adoption of concrete solutions to the problem of serious violence and abuse of female athletes;
• Raise and submit a petition on the issue to the EU that is participated by citizens in the European Union.
INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS:
• IO1 – Publication “State of the Art and Best Practices in Tackling Violence against Female Athletes”;
• IO2 – Toolkit “Strategies and Tools for Empowering Athletes”;
• IO3 – Training Course “The Crucial Role of Sports Professionals in Combating Abuse, Violence and Discrimination against Women in Sports”;
• IO4 – Model “A Centralized Peer-to-Peer Helpdesk Model for Female Athletes”;
• IO5 – European Petition “Enhancing Safety Measures for Female Athletes in Europe”.
The EWA project is co-funded under the Erasmus+ program of the European Union.
