Newsletter / August 2022 / We Completed the Women Write Beautiful Stories Implementer Trainings

We Completed the Women Write Beautiful Stories Implementer Trainings

We got beautiful feedback from beautiful stories

To date, 198 women have written beautiful stories. Mavi Kalem employees who received the Women Write Beautiful Stories practitioner training, different NGO employees, municipality employees and volunteers mediated the writing of these stories. We have given implementer trainings to 53 women so far. They also shared with us their observations and feedback they received directly from women in their implementations.

Women who participated in the Women Write Beautiful Stories implementations stated that they were pleased to learn about the mobile phone applications that they can use especially in case of violence, the ‘Women’s Shelter’ and ‘Restraining Order’ processes, that they can reach the emergency hotlines 24/7 and to learn about the free services of Legal Aid Offices, Social Service Centers and Municipalities.

Regarding the implementation method, participants stated that the cardboard figures were interesting and made it easier to focus, the storytelling method kept the information in mind, it was a fun, lively application that is open to alteration instead of a didactic approach. Implementers also conveyed their observations that the participants realized that some of the normalized violent events could be a reason for complaint, that their participation was high during the implementation, and they found it exciting that a different scenario emerged in each session.

In December 2021, we set out to develop a simple, understandable and easy-to-use method in which we will talk about our legal rights against violence and under what conditions we can use them. As a result, a method has emerged where we use cardboard figures and stage board as tools, narrate the plots of physical violence, and reinforce the legal rights-application mechanisms through these stories. We aimed that women implement this method with each other, accompanied by tea and coffee. For this purpose, all the women we gave implementer training use the set consisting of cardboard figures, a stage board, an implementation guide and a brochure on legal rights against violence.

We would like to thank Adana Seyhan Kadın Dayanışma Merkezi, Malat Ya Şam Derneği, Avcılar Belediyesi Kadın Danışma Merkezi, Mavi Kalem community volunteers and Mavi Kalem’s teams working on gender-based violence, who have participated in our Women Write Beautiful Stories implementer trainings so far.

In the upcoming period of the Women Write Beautiful Stories project, we will continue to support the rehearsals and implementations of women who received implementer training, and collect their feedback and observations.

‘Women Write Beautiful Stories’ is a Mavi Kalem project. It is sponsored by the Irish Embassy.