Safe City Tour: Youths in focus in Haugesund
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City stories
Udgivet: 08 Jul - 2021
The Safe City Tour travels to Haugesund
Youths taking a stand for mental health & wellbeing, strengtening youth outreach & services beyond Covid, working group to prevent drug abuse & radicalisation among youths, open dialogue between police and youths, teaching life skills, perspective, conflict resolution in schools & pioneering the ‘I C U C’ model in Haugesund.
The last week of the Safe City Tour before the summer break took us to the Norwegian city of Haugesund, where we learned about their work bringing the ’I C U C’ model to Norway, using the culture house and mentors to prevent radicalisation, how the city and the local police cooperate, and heard from the Youth council about their work on mental health.
Images: Haugesund Municipality
In 2021 Haugesund and Nordic Safe Cities take action to develop effective practices and adaptable, and individualised Action Plans to reach youth in risk of exclusion and marginalisation. And to implement the Finnish ‘I C U C’ model in Norway through the ‘Safe City Norway’ project.
More broadly, Haugesund’s strategy focuses deeply on prevention and on having a strong coordination network to be able to anticipate developments and act early on signs of extremism. The strategy emphasises a shared knowledge base on how to handle concerns of extremism on all levels of government. Additionally, Haugesund has preventative measures targeting different groups at various risk stages in place.
On the first day of the Safe City Tour, Vice Mayor Trine Meling Stokland welcomes us to Haugesund.
Trine explains, “We have been part of the Nordic Safe Cities network for some years now. And we see the network as an important arena to gain knowledge, share experiences, and work together with other Nordic cities to prevent violent extremism and hateful speech.”
– This week Haugesund will share selected projects and efforts that we believe are vital in our preventive work.
Haugesund has through Nordic Safe Cities been introduced to the Finnish program “ICUC”. A school program designed to teach life skills, perspective, dialogue and conflict resolution.
Haugesund Municipality in collaboration with Totalen and Klok Produksjon have been working to adapt the program for Norwegian schools and to be used in Haugesund. In the film below, you will be shown an excerpt of what the students will learn about group relations.
Nina Bersaas Jacobsen is the cultural center manager at Gamle Slakthuset. Today she presents three projects within Haugesund’s preventive work.
The project ‘Kjekt Hima’ was a project started after concerns about the lack of services for young people who stayed in the city in the summer of 2020 due to the ongoing pandemic. Gamle Slakthuset was opened for activity and young employees were recruited to conduct activity and outreach work to young people in the city center, Vangen and in other parts of the city.
‘Open Zone’ is the continuation of Kjekt Hima to ensure that young people have a broader offer during a challenging period. Several of the employees at Kjekt Hima joined and Slakthuset is still open to young people Tuesday-Thursday 17-22 and Friday-Saturday 17-23 and when the summer comes, the employees will still run outreach activities in the city youth environment.
The ‘Mentor Program’ is a training program where employees who work closely with young people receive training in recognizing signs of a commencing radicalization in individual adolescents. They also have a toolbox to move forward with the municipality’s service to be able to initiate measures for the individual youth.
On the last day of the Safe City Tour in Haugesund, the municipality highlights their cooperation with the local police to prevent drug abuse and radicalisation among youths.
Haugesund has for many years worked closely with the police. The police are represented in committees where crime and drug prevention are discussed and information is shared, respectively SLT steering group and the Police Council. Haugesund Municipality also has its own working group against radicalisation where the police are represented and participate together with the municipality in knowledge sharing and events under the auspices of Nordic Safe Cities.
The police also have regular contact with municipal and voluntary services aimed at young people in the city center. Pictured below is the Open Zone at Gamle Slaktehuset where the police regularly stop by to talk to young people, participate in the activities at the house and answer questions the young people may have.
Images: Gamle Slaktehuset Allaktivitetshus, Haugesund
The local youths themselves also play a large role in strengthening wellbeing and social inclusion among young people.
Radicalisation and terrorism most often arise as a result of complex processes at the individual, group and societal level. Over the past year, Haugesund Youth Council has worked with mental illness, which can be a risk factor for radicalisation.
To round off the Safe City Tour, the leader of the Haugesund youth council, Eivind Tornli, talks about the youth council’s work with BUP (Child and adolescent psychiatric outpatient clinic) and the challenges young people experience in their interactions with the BUP system.
This concludes the Safe City Tour in Haugesund. To learn more, read their Safe City Portrait below:
Safe City Portrait