Source article: "À Issoire, un escape game sensibilise les lycéens aux violences conjugales", Jean-Baptiste Botella, La Montagne, 07/02/2023.
Stéphanie, a student at Sainte-Claire-Deville high school, has not shown up for class for several days. She is not answering her friends’ texts either. So a group of her classmates decide to go to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend in order to figure out where she is.
About 70 final year students from a vocational high school in the town of Issoire played out this scenario on 3 February as part of an escape game put together by REPROF, a local network for the protection of women who are victims of violence. Women’s rights and equalities representative for the Puy-de-Dôme local authority, Claire Cohadon explains, “We were inspired by an escape game that was organised in Ambert. The goal is to identify the warning signs of domestic abuse, to decipher them and to find the services and people to turn to if you are a witness or a victim”.
Searching For Clues
The students had 25 minutes to search all of the rooms – the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom – and to collect as many clues as possible before forming hypotheses, just like real investigators.
This initial activity was followed by two round-table conferences with members of the REPROF network in order to explore the students’ feelings and reactions to this experience, and to discuss the typical indicators of domestic violence, as well as various possible solutions to deal with these kinds of situations.
Inès, a final year student of management studies, admits, “I learned a lot. From now on I’ll pay more attention to all of these little signs.”
Léa, another student, thinks that she is “more likely to remember the information because it was done in the form of a game.” An opinion shared by Manon who feels better prepared to react if she ever notices that someone has become a victim of domestic violence.
“From now on I’ll pay more attention to all of these little signs”
Dorian, who is more shy, didn’t realise that “domestic violence could even lead to the victim being killed”. The young man now feels better educated on this topic and has even memorised several ways to report abuse, such as the helpline number 3919.
During the day, the students were able to learn more about domestic violence, but the effects were more far-reaching. “At first, they just came to play a game, but we realised that afterwards they started talking about it to other people. This is how we make progress,” Claire Cohadon suggests.
The Start of Something Bigger
Maud Leroy, the school’s headteacher, is proud that her school hosted this event. “I am thrilled," she said, "I think this kind of initiative can help us further educate young people, especially about respect.”
She also sees this activity as an opportunity to bring people together and to collaborate with other associations. “We will now be able to ask local organisations to come to our school in order to further educate our students about violence.”
This escape game could very well be the first step in increasing awareness of the topic among local students. It could help them to learn to recognise the signs and thus prevent this scenario – one of their friends going missing – from becoming a reality.
Translated by Margot Racine, Fanny Pisseloup and Julie Rodhon.
Editing by Sam Trainor.