Nowadays, the frequency of gender violence is extremely high; 1 in 3 (35%) of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence (World Health Organization, 2016 ). In 2009, Miguel Carcaño, adolescent, confessed to have raped and killed his ex-girlfriend, Marta del Castillo. After entering prison, a platform was launched in support of the self-confessed murderer, through which his admirers declared their desire to meet and to start a relationship with him. We can find examples like this worldwide. After participating in 12 competitive research projects, Dr. Puigvert and her team concluded in 2008 (and published in the Journal Violence Against Women, 1st Quartile JCR) that some adolescents have been socialized into a type of relationships that link attraction and violence. The same year she was appointed as member of the Expert Group on Gender Violence at the European Women’s Lobby, platform where Dr. Puigvert continued deepening in these analyses. The FREE_Teen_Desire project was framed from this experience and scholarship as well as new research approaches, in order to take further steps. In 2014, Dr. Puigvert was Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Criminology (IoC) at Cambridge University for two months; stablishing an initial collaboration that became a first step for the elaboration and development of the FREE_Teen_Desire project. During the academic year 2015-2016, the scholar has been a Marie Curie Fellow at IoC. Currently this link is being maintained due to an extension as a Visiting Scholar for the year 2016-2017 at the CCGSJ -Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice within the Institute of Criminology, at Cambridge University.
The project FREE_Teen_Desire has been carried out under three main aims: 1) exploring to which extent, dialogue situations (based on a language of desire) can question adolescent girls’ desires that link attractiveness to violent behaviours, 2) assessing whether this dialogic questioning of girls’ desire, if any, is true beyond cultures; thus breaking down cultural and racist stereotypes associated to VAW, and 3) developing the evidence-based approaches needed to increase effectiveness in the prevention of gender violence among adolescents. Counting on the expertise of Prof. Gelsthorpe, FREE_Teen_Desire became a framework for scholarly exchange to develop a quasi-experimental study with 493 adolescent girls and young women from four different countries, as well as a qualitative analysis of some of their stories. This approach contributed to open new lines of research and channels of collaboration with the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, as well as with colleges within the University such as the Pembroke and Wolfson Colleges.
The development of the project has also lead to the opening of political and social future collaborations, such as the County Council and the Youth Criminal Justice in Cambridge. In the same vein, networks of cooperation among secondary schools from different countries have been stablished.
The ground-breaking and original nature of the FREE_Teen_Desire project has laid on the fact of providing new scientific data on a field that has been barely explored. The outcomes are being capitalized in order to inform the definition of actions, programs and campaigns in the fight against VAW. FREE_Teen_Desire demonstrated through rigorous scientific inquiry that the association of desire and violence can be dismantled through dialogue. Indeed, socialization processes which not link attraction towards violence might be promoted in order to enjoy sexual-affective relationships free of violence; which means a scientific cornerstone on the issue.
This great impact described has been achieved because the findings obtained have a wide social utility for society. The FREE_Teen_Desire results show the necessity of reconsidering the scientific knowledge adopted in the design of interventions to prevent gender violence, particularly for the relevance to implement those procedures and policies that are based on the questioning of the language of desire. As it can be observed, the Dialogic Feminist Gatherings (the intervention executed in the quasi-experimental study), effectively questioned the desire of young women towards violent young men and thus contributing to support young women for responding to gender violence
