All participating schools and organisations were eager to make our schools a safer and more friendly and peaceful place for everyone. To achieve this we aimed at raising awareness of individuals about all forms of bullying and to create sustainable changes. This included the ability of identifying and recognizing different forms of bullying as well as to provide students and those being victims of bullying with tools and ways of handling bullying. As bullying often occurs in inclusive classrooms and with children from different socio-cultural, economic and ethnic groups as in our schools we also wanted to raise awareness of reasons for bullying and its effects. Many bullied students feel lonely and helpless and may retreat instead of asking for help. These negative emotions then trigger negative thoughts and cause a decrease in academic achievement. This sometimes even leads to dropout, one of the main education problems nowadays which we wanted to address.
We did apply for this project because we realized that bullying is so deeply ingrained in every stage of our lives that no institution or individual can stay away from it. Furthermore, many people including parents and teachers happen to witness some form of bullying in school and also outside. They often feel helpless in such situations because they do not know how to deal with bullying and its effects on others. We were also aware of the fact that parents and teachers are often unaware of bullying as it often takes place unnoticed. During and after the Covid pandemic we also noticed that cyberbullying had increased with students spending more time on social networks and in front of the computer. Being back at school after the pandemic brought cyberbullying to school, too, so that we had to face not only bullying face-to-face but on social networks, too. We all tried to find ways to help students and fight all sorts of bullying using different approaches, some more efficient than others. We were therefore also looking for ways to exchange and share our experiences. We needed to see different practices around bullying and to collaborate and look for solutions together. "