During the Academic Day, which took place on 22 June 2023, Milena Mileva Blažić delivered a lecture entitled How fairy tales can become an instrument to reach out children and raise awareness on the protection from abuse among them.
A researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Education, and also an associate of the Dovolj.je Institute, she presented the difference between problem (being on the side of the children) and problematic (being on the side of the perpetrator) fairy tales.
As an example, she cited the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale The Children of Hamelin (1816), one of the few fairy tales that could possibly be about the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1284, the medieval plague (hence the motif of rats and the magic squeak) or child abuse.
The theme is extremely topical, as it was also addressed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust and Bertold Brecht in The Children’s Crusade (1939, in connection with the Holocaust), and has been set to music by Jani Kovačič (2020), among others.
Milena Mileva Blažić also presented Anton Martin Slomšek’s fairy tale The Old Fox and the Young Hen (1866) and the figure of the wolf in the works of Charles Perrault (1797) and the Grimm brothers (1857).
As a case study, she applied Slavoj Žižek’s theory The Seven Veils of Phantasms from his book The Plague of Phantasms (1995, 2007) to Svetlana Makarovič’s picture book The Red Apple (2008), illustrated by Kaja Kosmač – a modern variant of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood.
At the same time, the author presented a mapping of the fairy tale The Children of Hamelin from 1284 and a mapping of the fairy tale type Little Red Riding Hood. Both selected fairy tales are universal fairy tale types, typical for all cultures, which means that violence and/or child abuse are, unfortunately, universal for all times, institutions and cultures.
The author believes that children need to be sensitised, made aware and taught through literature to perceive and overcome different forms of violence and abuse, which is a lifelong learning process.
In the photo, from right to left: Jörg Michael Fegert, PhD, (University Clinic, Ulm, Germany), Jani Kovačič, Milena Mileva Blažić, PhD, (Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana), Hans Zollner, PhD, (Institute of Anthropology, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy), and Janez Cerar at the International Safeguarding Conference.