Within this year’s campaign on raising awareness about gender-based violence, in cooperation with UNHCR, IOM and Roma Association Bibija, Praxis will organize six performances of a play entitled “Say STOP to Violence”, which is aimed at prevention of violence against women and human trafficking, and at informing and engaging Roma community.

The play “Say STOP to Violence” is made in a form of interactive theatre, so called the “theatre of the oppressed”, which has been officially labelled by the United Nations as a tool for achieving social changes. It consists of a series of theatre workshops and interactive plays which incite people to act and take over the control of their life situations.

Vera Erac and Mirela Pavlovic, authors of the play, together with 12 Roma actors, will try to point to different forms of violence against Roma women and to motivate the audience to discern available possibilities and choices that women, victims of this type of violence, have. With the assistance of a lawyer and a social worker, they will share with the audience information about existing resources and mechanisms of institutional protection and emphasise the need for changing attitude of the society towards violence against women and the necessity of giving a united response to it.

The play “Say STOP to Violence” follows life and events within a Roma family displaced from Kosovo. The family have a difficult life and are faced with numerous forms of violence, such as ethnic discrimination, alcoholism, family violence, human trafficking, prostitution and beggary, work exploitation. The actor, amateurs, will try to present specific characteristics of Roma population, traditional and cultural elements reflected in the phenomenon of gender based violence, and numerous forms of discrimination they face every day as a marginalized group of population.

After the scenes have been played, the audience will have the possibility to create the play again. They will be invited to take the role of actors and to express their opinion on the stage, to point to the problems they are facing and suggest potential solutions to overcome them.

During 2010, a total of six performances of the play “Say STOP to Violence” will be organized in Kragujevac, Krusevac, Nis, Subotica and Belgrade.