Help 5,000 Thai Girls Protect Themselves

Dear Supporters,

Sawadee ka!

It’s been a highly productive season for us. As mentioned in our earlier update, our team had planned to visit the northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani in fall. We conducted training in 10 high schools, arming teenage girls with skills to repel sexual harassment and violence. Through our ‘Claim Your Rights’ workshops, we trained 2,016 of them in 

- recognising, avoiding and responding to dangerous situations;
- knowing their rights under Thai law (Act on the Prevention and Resolution of Domestic   
  Violence and Criminal Code Amendment Act);
- reporting violent and sexual crimes;
- and basic self defence.

We hope through the skills and knowledge they’ve picked up from us, they would be more aware and report domestic and sexual violence within their families and communities, and know how to deal with exploitative and abusive work environments when they migrate to urban centres for work.

The students enjoyed themselves tremendously during their time with us with almost all citing in a post-workshop evaluation survey that they had never experienced training of this sort before. They added it would certainly come in handy as most of them had witnessed violence before, in and out of school, and had experienced harassment because of their body type or skin tone.

We’re not finished with Ubon yet, and will be back in January to continue our mission of reaching out to more underprivileged girls. Every girl we’re able to reach will hopefully lead to one less tragic story and statistic in the scourge of gender-based violence and discrimination. And we can only do this with your continued generous support. 

Regards,

Pratthanadee Team 

Dear Supporters,

Sawadee ka!

We hope your summer’s been great. Ours was spent conducting a gender violence mapping exercise in Ubon Ratchathani. For this survey, we collected data from 1,019 girls in six schools. The findings were revelatory for us. Six out of 10 girls cited schools as the place where they had experienced violence or a dangerous situation, rather than their neighborhoods or homes. Also notable was that teachers were not the first choice of contact when faced with a dangerous situation; only 15.8% thought of asking help from them. We had assumed schools to be one of the safest places for children. How wrong we were! Guess we’ll have to tag this as a future project to help schools develop a friendly and safe environment.

While not as oft cited as schools, two out of 10 girls mentioned homes as the place where they had witnessed violence. Domestic violence is a tricky challenge as it involves having to deal with family members. This is an area we need to look into as well, specifically on how we can design culturally sensitive interventions.

These insights will definitely inform our work in future including the workshops we’ll be running in November with your funding, covering awareness and prevention of danger, girls’ laws and rights in Thailand, avenues for help and basic self-defense.

There’ll be more updates when we hit the ground again in the northeastern provinces three months later. As always, we’re grateful for your support.

All the best,

Pratthanadee Team