Help 5,000 Thai Girls Protect Themselves

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