Key words: peer education, gender differences, violence, culture at risk, adolescence
This article aims to narrate an experience of peer education, set in a professional school in the outskirts of Naples. The goal was to highlight and share the obtained results and evidences, concerning methods useful to our work in this environment. The specifity of this operation is to work with teenagers, in a high-risk neighborhood on themes like gender differences, aiming to deconstruct gender stereotypes specific to their background and linked to violent dynamics, and to co-build new values with active participation from the kids in a construction view. This project has been divided in two phases: the first one is the training phase of peer education, based on the actions which made the kids act as creators of the process, and the second phase, during which, through sessions of peer education in other schools, the kids independently carried out sensitization interventions. The fundamental methodological starting point has been putting together specific methods of psychosocial approach and psychodynamic vision. This means the use of methods based on participation with the creation of a dynamic environment of exchange, empathic dialogue, containment concerning personal experiences and anxieties linked to them. Peer education is a method very useful, especially if you work with teenagers, because it is based on the important role of the group, during adolescence, in the process of construction of identity and subjectivity, and also because it is a support to the evolutionary pressures towards a process of a differentiation and identification. Starting from their personal lives, from violent dynamics close to their daily life, such as jealousy and possessiveness, have been recognized and deconstructed stereotypes related to gender differences and have been built new values, giving way to emotions, doubts, and personal characteristics of the single inside the group. During the second phase, when they became actors of an intervention aimed at promoting gender equality, they have referred repeatedly to their experience and their sense of indifference, during initial phase of training, highlighting the changes that have incurred between beginning and the end of the same. The obtained results have been evident: from increasing awareness of their emotions and relational methods, to increasing self-efficiency through interested, active participation. These results highlight the validity of a work structured with these methodological assumptions, which can be seen as starting point for future developments.
