The conference was organised by MZOS and the UNICEF Croatia office with representatives of the Olweus Institute from Norway - the home of the bullying prevention programme - as special guests and representatives from countries in the region and many other countries, school teachers, parents and experts in child violence attending. The conference is part of a global project - Making the Invisible Visible.
Science Minister Vedran Mornar welcomed the conference saying that the problem of peer violence was a huge challenge for the education system everywhere in the world and that anyone working to prevent violence against children should be supported. He underscored that UNICEF's model against violence had been successfully implemented in Croatian schools. He added that this success can be assigned to the fact that the entire education system was involved including parents and the general public.
Reidar Thyholdt from Olweus Institute spoke about bullying and its prevention, explaining that bullying was a one-sided action and was not a conflict. It is akin to rape, it is not an illness but unacceptable behaviour intended to harm someone else and is repeated by a physically or mentally stronger person. Bullying can be hidden, physical, emotional and can be 'face to face' or via electronic media.
He recalled that the first research into bullying and its prevention was conducted in Sweden in the wake of a tragic suicide of three young boys as a result of bullying.
The head of the UNICEF Croatia office, Valentina Otmacic, told reporters that Croatia has been successfully implementing a preventative programme for the past ten years and that violence amongst children in schools had been halved.
This has been confirmed with the publication of an English edition of a handbook about the programme written by Jasenka Pregrad which was presented at the conference. The programme was completely designed by Croatian experts and UNICEF has been successfully implementing it and it has since been adopted in Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Slovenia.