My name is Isidora Paklar (32) from Novi Sad. I work as an Information and Education Coordinator at the IRIDA organization. I graduated from the Faculty of Law in Novi Sad and later completed my master’s degree in Gender Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences. I am a certified youth worker with years of experience working with young people. In 2018, together with my fellow youth worker colleagues, I founded IRIDA to focus on preventing gender-based violence among young people and promoting the values of gender equality. Our goal is to educate and empower young people so that they can actively contribute to a culture of equality in their communities. I also coordinate the This Is Also Violence program, which educates young people about forms of gender-based violence that are harder to recognize. The first generation of participants focused on the issue of psychological violence in intimate relationships, while the second generation addressed the problem of sexual harassment. After completing training on sexual harassment and short story writing, the participants wrote their own short stories on this topic, and IRIDA published a collection of their works. The collection received extremely positive feedback, with suggestions to distribute it to experts working in this field and to ensure it reaches as many young people as possible to open a dialogue on this crucial issue. Through my participation in this program, I aim to work on a theater production addressing the topic of sexual harassment, using the short story collection as a foundational source.
