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The year 2018-19 has been fabulous for Arpan, with an annual outreach of over 69,800 individuals, which makes it a 23% year on year growth! We saw a phenomenal breakthrough in outreach and advocacy, be it with schools, the government or civil society organisations (both at state and national levels). Our training and resource materials travelled across the country, as well as offshore. In early 2019, the United Nations Population Fund in Guatemala printed 6000 copies of our ‘My Little Body Book’ in Spanish and Mayan Mam language. Further, taking our work to a different space, we launched an e-learning platform (www.arpanelearn.com) for children and caregivers to learn about Personal Safety Education. The past year has also been immensely significant for us because our work has been cited in the first-ever global index on child sexual abuse: ‘Out of the Shadows: Shining light on the response to child sexual abuse and exploitation,’ developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit. Also, we are extremely honoured that celebrated actress Vidya Balan joined Arpan’s journey as Goodwill Ambassador!
Personal Safety Education
In the past year, we reached out to 33,488 children and 24,976 adults through our Personal Safety Education (PSE) programme
PSE is Arpan's key programme. It is a life skill-based holistic prevention and intervention school-based model to help children identify and seek help in an unsafe situation so that they can participate in their own safety. The programme also involves awareness building and skill enhancement of parents, teachers and other stakeholders so they can create strong safety and support networks around children in their respective environments. The programme has a strong healing component as well. In the past year, we provided counselling support to 1,333 children and 550 family members through 6,151 individual sessions and 145 group sessions.
Mental Health Services
There is limited acceptance that Child Sexual Abuse can affect the mental health of a child and can continue to affect a person’s life during adulthood if not healed. There is a broad variety of practical, cultural, individual and family-related barriers that restrict initialization and adherence to therapy and counselling. To respond to this, Arpan provides long-term psychotherapeutic support to adolescent girls and boys in shelter homes who have been sexually abused or trafficked and provide healing support to children and adult survivors of Child Sexual Abuse through Mental Health Services.
We offered healing services to 46 children and 17 adults through two institutions and did capacity building training of 8 adults in the institutions to deal with cases of Child Sexual Abuse effectively. Apart from this, we provided counselling to 36 children, 14 adults and 9 trusted adults (family members) and to nine children who indulged in sexual misbehaviour.
Training and Advocacy
Working toward systemic change, we continued our advocacy with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India to take Personal Safety Education across the country. We also engaged with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) toward finalising the topic ‘Safety and Security’ for the curriculum on Health and Wellness for school-going adolescents under the aegis of ‘Ayushman Bharat’.
Further, we initiated conversations with the Ministry of Education, Maharashtra and the Directorate of Education, Government of Delhi to mainstream Personal Safety Education in the educational curriculum. We also initiated work with the Government of Bihar to train Master Trainers across 38 districts in the state. Carrying forward our work with the Maharashtra State Council of Educational Research and Training (MSCERT), we trained school counsellors; and also trained teachers and counsellors in collaboration with the district administrations in Chandrapur, Kolhapur and Thane districts of Maharashtra. We conducted refresher training as well for teachers under the Special Education Department, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM).
In the past year, we trained a total of 2002 stakeholders:
- 1,110 teachers
- 781 social workers
- 111 mental health professionals
In addition to this, we conducted awareness sessions on understanding Child Sexual Abuse with over 9000 adults. These trainings were conducted across the country - Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana.
Online Prevention Programme
Realising the potential of an interactive e-Learning platform as an easy and efficient learning tool to transcend geographical boundaries and scale Personal Safety Education programme, we launched a responsive website on 13 Feb 2019 where children can learn about Personal Safety and adults can acquire awareness about Child Sexual Abuse prevention and intervention.
At our site, one can find eBooks for adults on the prevention and intervention of Child Sexual Abuse and an interactive flipbook for children aged five and above. There is also a Personal Safety course for 8-10-year-old children in English and Hindi, which consists of videos and quizzes and will provide children with a platform to become well versed in keeping themselves safe. This course is created in a way that it is responsive to diverse technology platforms. The instructor of the course is a charming exercise-loving dog called ‘Chisa’. When we piloted the course with 200 students in Mumbai, the children loved not just the course but also adorable Chisa!
We hope to reach out to millions of children through this course and empower them to participate in their safety!
You can take a look at the course at www.arpanelearn.com
Resource Development
Arpan’s Personal Safety Education Kit is a culmination of our years of understanding and experience of helping prevent Child Sexual Abuse. It is an outcome of reflective practice and is a feature-rich set of tools and instructional guides to help teachers, NGO professionals, counsellors, and other individuals to teach children Personal Safety skills. In the past year, based on our observations and feedback from children, parents and teachers, we revised our Kit in all the three languages– Hindi, English and Marathi. We also published modules in Hindi and Marathi for 7th- 8th Grades and 9th-10 Grades, which were earlier not available.
Making it easier for trainers, teachers, parents, other adult stakeholders as well as children, we published a Key Messages for Personal Safety Education booklet; brought out a revised edition of ‘My Safety Book’ in English and published for the first time Hindi and Marathi versions of this book. We now also have our posters and stickers available in Urdu, and we have developed an FAQ booklet for adolescents on how to stay safe from sexual abuse.
Since we believe that Personal Safety Education should begin for children as early as possible, for the first time we piloted a PSE module for pre-primary grades. Further, as part of our Step Up programme, to ensure that we reach out to even those children where schools, due to time constraints, cannot give us four hours or six hours with a batch in a year, we launched an hour-long PSE module for Grades 3rd-6th.
Research Monitoring and Evaluation
Keeping in sync with our commitment to regularly evaluate the work we do, we released the report ‘Classroom Lesson Based Personal Safety Education (PSE) Programme for Children: Evidence and Implications for Conducting a Step Up Program among Children Receiving a One-Time Intervention’. This report looks at the impact of our Step Up programme, which we introduced in 2016 as a refresher to our flagship programme - Personal Safety Education (PSE). Step Up schools are those where we had facilitated PSE in the past and revisit them to provide children with age-appropriate updates on Personal Safety as well as to refresh and re-assess their basic skills, knowledge and understanding. The objective of this evaluation study was to determine if there is a significant difference in the observed retention of the key concepts and messages of the PSE programme (i.e., the personal safety guideline, distinction of safe and unsafe touch and situations, the action points of ensuring safety, etc.) among the children, with respect to the post-implementation gap (measured in years) following the first implementation of the programme. The findings from this evaluation corroborate our understanding that a refresher (Step-up) implementation is indeed desirable for children, for them to continue to participate in their personal safety - 92% retention of all key concepts was observed in children with a post-implementation gap of one year, 86% and 83% retention in children with a gap of two years and three years, respectively.
At Arpan, while long-term psychotherapeutic intervention programme at rehabilitation homes (mentioned earlier) has also been instrumental in healing rescued girls over the years, a need was felt to understand and interpret these outcomes. In an attempt to document the salient outcomes of this long-term therapeutic journey, based on the effects visible in the group over the last one year, we published a report titled, ‘Case Studies of Long-Term Psychotherapy in Institutional Setting’. The subsequent sections of the report also present success stories of two cases whose individual crises had been addressed through repeated crisis interventions, over the length of their stay at the rehabilitation home.
Public Engagement
We are thankful to Vidya Balan, whose association with us as our brand ambassador has enhanced the visibility of the fantastic work that we have been doing!
We never let go of an opportunity to make associations and participate in events where we can spread awareness about what we do and why the cause is so important. In the past year, we partnered with Nickelodeon, appeared at the Windmill Festival 2018, participated at the Tata Marathon 2019, and organized 30 Days in September - a gripping play, written by MaheshDattani and directed by LilletteDubey on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse, which had inspired our founder Pooja Taparia to start Arpan all those years ago.
We also had the opportunity to present our thoughts at a round table discussion on the efficacy of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Law organised by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and at consultations by Tata Trusts on child protection in child care institutions. We were invited as speakers and resource persons to events organized by the UNICEF, Principals Conclave (Mumbai), Assam SCPCR, SOL's Arc and SNDT University to deliberate upon child protection in the country and to present Arpan’s best practices. Our founder, Pooja Taparia, was invited by SheThePeopleTV, in association with the Consulate General of Canada in Mumbai, to speak about her work and Arpan’s journey.
In the past year, we distributed 80,069 resource materials – indicating our persistent drive to take the dialogue around the issue of Child Sexual Abuse to as many people as possible. Through social media outreach, we were able to connect with 36,238 people.
Accolades
We are proud that Arpan’s work has received immense appreciation over the years. This year was no different. Arpan has been certified as a Great Place to Work – a gold standard certification that organizations aspire to achieve globally; its metrics include the Trust Index and Culture Audit to establish the standard that defines a great workplace.
We are also proud to share that Arpan was awarded the GuideStar India Champion level Platinum certification. This certification is based on an organisation’s level of transparency and public accountability after rigorous due diligence carried out by a team of experts. It includes verifying financial and legal compliances through thorough scrutiny of registration documents, tax returns, FCRA returns, audited financial statements and auditor's reports, public disclosures on our portal, reporting key facts to stakeholders, etc.
Our founder Pooja Taparia was honoured with the ‘Inspire Parivartan Award 2018-19’ by Brit Worldwide Global for her contribution to child protection.
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