‘They need to see the people they are affecting by their decision-making’: developing participatory advocacy with young people on sexual violence in Albania, Moldova and Serbia: monitoring and evaluation report

Responding to the gap identified above, the Our Voices programme seeks to build capacity and knowledge about the ethical involvement of children and young people in participatory work addressing sexual violence at an international level (for more information visit: www.our-voices.org.uk). Our Voices is co-ordinated by the International Centre: Researching child sexual exploitation, violence and trafficking (IC) at the University of Bedfordshire in England, United Kingdom, and co-funded by Oak Foundation. As part of the broader Our Voices programme, the IC co-ordinated the OVTOO project between November 2016 and March 2020. This report focuses on one component of the OVTOO project: the OVTOO youth advocacy project. As part of the OVTOO youth advocacy project, the IC collaborated with three partner organisations in Eastern Europe: Different & Equal (D&E) in Albania; National Center for Child Abuse Prevention (NCCAP) in Moldova; and NGO ATINA (ATINA) in Serbia. The three partner organisations work directly with children and young people affected by different forms of sexual violence including trafficking for sexual exploitation. The aim of the project was to build the capacity of the three partner organisations to safely involve young people with experience of sexual violence in participatory advocacy on this issue. To this end, the IC supported the partners to deliver a 12-week participatory advocacy training programme with a small group of young people who were current or former users of their services. The purpose of the training programme was to equip participants with skills and knowledge to become youth advocates; to enable them to identify a problem in relation to sexual violence affecting children and young people in their country and develop advocacy activities to address this problem in their local contexts.