09-12-20, Baramulla: Representatives of Save Youth Save Future (SYSF) organised the third event of series of full-day trainings as part of the project “Free 4 Youth: Fighting radicalization to enhance e-strategy for a youth-comprehensive approach towards on-line terrorism”. The Seminar was attended by up to 60 youngsters, from across South, Central and North Kashmir.

The first session of the trainings focused on critical thinking, social representations, media bias and the portrayal of reality in the media. The idea of the session was to see how people are influenced by news and especially by disinformation and biased statements. This interactive workshop allowed to examine how media consumers elaborate certain representation of objects, social groups or events. It started with the theoretical input defining media bias and social representations, followed by a workshop in which participants worked on the definitions of various fallacies. They were assigned in groups to explore the logical fallacies in the statements. Then participants compared and debated their findings with their peers from other groups. Examples were particularly given in regards to the rhetoric and narratives of terrorist groups online.

The following session of the day was moderated by a renowned educator and writer who spoke about radicalization, its different causal pathways and emergent manifestations. Youngsters further shared their experiences with terror and violence, and emphasized its futility. More-so, young girls narrated their brushes with terror and as to how many of them and their relatives suffered at the hands of militants. At the end, a resolution, abhorring every manifestation of violence was adopted by the youth gathering.