This volume describes the ideational effort required to design and implement a training-course model for "Experts in proximity violence". The Pilot project design has envisaged a framework where the concepts referring to broad reflections on the topic have be related to the professional skills to be trained. Proximity violence concerns multiple forms of gender-based violence which conceal, in turn, more subtle, intimate and viscous forms of dependence.
The course was based on modules and availed itself of a "mixed" methodology, where theoretical lectures were interwoven with experiential workshops.
During the first six months of 2019, over 800 Italian, French and Spanish operators engaged on the migratory front, attended the courses. The model presented in the first two chapters of the present volume was accompanied and corroborated by a set of ex-ante and ex-post questionnaires. The first set, illustrated in chapter three, aimed at pin-pointing the training needs of the operators and stakeholders to whom it was administered and who then attended the course.
The ex-post questionnaires, presented in chapter four, regarded an appraisal of the course provided by those who had participated in and completed the course, and confirmed the positive achievement of the goal established by the Provide Project (Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme 2014-2020): that of defining a structured curriculum capable of addressing the problem of proximity and gender violence by providing adequate training, appropriate tools and skills to be used by professionals to identify, prevent and treat the phenomenon.

Ignazia Bartholini is associate professor of General Sociology and Social Policies at the University of Palermo. She was also the scientific coordinator of the PROVIDE project funded by the EU. Among her most recent works: (ed.), Proximity violence in migration times. A Focus in some Regions of Italy, France and Spain (FrancoAngeli, 2019).