Before the start of the Travelling Festival, student activists gathered together for one purpose: to learn how to properly moderate discussions and how to oppose cyberbullying.

Digital technology improves the quality of our lives, but many threats lurk in the world wide web. The phenomenon of intentional bullying in cyberspace, usually over a long period of time, is becoming more and more widespread online. The possibility to say anything anonymously to anyone gives us a misleading feeling of security. Meanwhile, bullies collect personal information by monitoring our behavior on social media—photos, selfies from locations, stories about our lives—and use it against the internet user. They steal passwords to private pages or emails in order to make threats or spread spam mail.

The participants of the seminar titled “Training Discussion Moderators for the Travelling Docudays UA Festival” in Kirovohrad Region learned how to avoid becoming a victim of cyberbullying and how to oppose it. The event was organized jointly by the regional coordinators of Docudays UA—Lyudmyla Shestakova, the executive director of NGO Flora, and Olena Mirkhaydarova, the head of NGO Successful Interaction.

Iryna Sydorenko, the Communications Manager of the Human Rights Department of Docudays UA, participated in the seminar and told the audience how to distinguish between bullying and regular conflicts, and about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. Bohdan Moysa, an expert from the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights  Union, spoke about the international experience of successfully opposing cyberbullying.

Under the guidance of communications expert Natalia Filipova, young people learned the art of public speaking, which is an important component of discussion moderation. The seminar participants had opportunities to organize discussions after screenings at their colleges. In addition, if schools express a wish to hold a Docudays UA human rights discussion among their students, the Travelling Festival coordinators are prepared to help them with it.

“The young moderators cannot wait to try out their new skills. For example, we had an idea to watch the film Listen with parents, because the difficulties that we see in the film are just as relevant for Ukrainian teenagers, too. The problems of Ukrainian teenagers are very similar to the difficulties of Dutch children,” noted Olena Mirkhaydarova, a regional coordinator of the Travelling Festival in Kirovohrad Region.

The Travelling Festival will travel around Kirovohrad Region between 18 and 29 November. So we invite everyone to attend its public film screenings. The screening schedule is available here.