Help prevent sexual abuse of children in India

The 1^st six months of 2017-18 have been amazing as we have successfully reached out to over 22,130 children & adults directly through our programmes and have reached 10,708 individuals through social media.

We are also proud to share that Arpan was the national winner of the Spirit of Humanity Award 2017 in the category of Child Care. The Spirit of Humanity is a national level recognition and reward platform for exemplary contributions made towards the society. Thought leaders from corporate, government, academia, social and CSR sectors unite at Spirit of Humanity for rendering their knowledge & expertise in evaluating the social impact created by participating organisations. Spirit of Humanity follows a stringent 3-step evaluation process to identify the Best-in-class NGOs each year. This year the Spirit of Humanity Awards had over 300 applications pan India across 6 categories. Being the regional winner in the Child Care category, Arpan presented its work along with the other finalists to a jury comprising of panelists like Dr. Jayesh Lele, National Secretary, Hospital Board of India, Namita Vikas, Group President and Global Head, CSR Banking Yes Bank Foundation, Rema Mohan Head CSR NSE and others.

Outreach and Impact of Projects, April-September 2017

Personal Safety Education Programme:

The Personal Safety Education Programme is Arpan’s flagship programme, which comprises 85% of Arpan’s work. It is a life skill education module developed by Arpan. This program is implemented in schools to empower children from Grades 1-10 with adequate knowledge, attitude and skills to prevent instances of Child Sexual Abuse as well as to seek support when such an incident has occurred. It supports children with counselling, post-disclosure, as well as work with children who indulged in sexual misbehaviour so that there is no reoffending.

Outreach of the Programme

The period from April to June is usually a lean period as far as school-based prevention is concerned. This is mainly due to exams followed by school holidays.  We thus used this opportunity to conduct the Personal Safety Education Programme with children living in institutions and communities. This year we have worked with 63 children living in the slum communities in Andheri East. This was through the support of a local NGO, Creative Handicrafts that works with these children.

Between July to September, the Personal Safety Education Programme was conducted in schools. We have continued with our PSE programme in new schools as well as our Step Up Programme, which is a refresher programme with age-appropriate content, for children with whom we have conducted PSE previously. The one-hour step module was piloted with VIII to X grade children.

Through the school-based PSE programme, Arpan has reached out to 17,293 individuals. Further details of the programme are as follows:

• Arpan reached out to 10,673 children through 35 schools and 1 community-based organisation

-          Of the above, the programme was conducted with 5,536 new children

-          Arpan reached out to 5,137 children through the step-up programme. This included;

• 1,365 children who attended the one-hour session
• 350 children who received leaflets with the key messages of Personal Safety Education and Arpan’s helpline number

• Post disclosure, 328 children and 115 adult family members were provided with Psychotherapeutic support through 1,096 counselling sessions
• 6620 parents, teachers and support staff were also empowered on Child Sexual Abuse through the personal safety education programme

Impact of the Programme

Feedback from Students:

“Arpan’s Personal Safety Education programme is very useful for our future and also for our present. You spoke about a child's safety, boundaries and privacy. This programme gives information on safe and unsafe touches, internet safety, healthy and harmful relationships etc. These are very good lessons, and we have learned a lot from this. I hope that this programme is conducted once in a week or once every month.” – Grade 10 Student

When Children become champions:

Story of change

A child in Grade VII, during the individual session, shared a story with the trainer. There was a new boy who recently moved in his area. One day, this new boy, touched the child’s friend’s penis. This incident shook up his best friend. The little boy was very nervous and became very scared. Seeing these changes in his friend, the child inquired, and his friend narrated the entire incident and told him about the abuse. That’s when the child assured his friend, not to worry as he can and will try to help. He recollected what was taught in the Personal Safety Education lessons and he implemented it in his practical experience by 1st listening to his best friend, not laughing or making fun of him, not making any promises, reassured him that this time they would need to take the help of their elders, thanking him for sharing his feelings and telling him that it was not his fault. The child took the friend to his parents and informed them, about it all, together they went over to the new boy’s house and immediately informed his parents. The child’s best friend’s parents were curious and asked him where he got so much information, and he told them that Arpan NGO had come to his school and given him and his entire class the knowledge and skills to keep themselves safe. His parents felt very proud & happy that the school had invited Arpan to conduct such lessons. The friend’s parents said that they want to take admission for their son in the child’s school itself so that their son could learn about Personal Safety as well and learn how to keep himself safe. The child thanked Arpan and the trainer for giving him the opportunity to help save his friend.

Mental Health Services

Arpan provides both mainstream and alternative therapeutic services to children, adult survivors of child sexual abuse and their families. These services are offered at the Arpan’s centre and at the community level with the support of NGO’s and social service organisations.

 Arpan through its project on Psychotherapeutic Services within the Institutional setup, reaches out to the highly marginalised group of rescued minors and children at risk within institutions and shelter homes with an aim to provide long-term and intensive individual and group psychotherapeutic services. The project also aims to build the capacity of caretakers within the institutional set up in order to create a care and support network for the children.

Outreach of the Programme

We have begun receiving more miscellaneous cases on account of referrals from schools where we conducted the PSE programme and through our visibility on search engines. In the last six months, Arpan has conducted 331 individual and 57 group sessions with the following stakeholders:

Long-term psychotherapeutic support was provided to 56 children and 20 adult survivors from institutions and a few miscellaneous cases that reached out to us directly.

The above includes 28 new children and 6 new adult survivors.

Arpan also conducted sessions on psycho-education with 4 caretakers and 4 staff members such as teachers at the institutions.

Arpan’s work with Prayas – counselling for children in conflict with the law. 

Prayas is an organisation that works towards the psychosocial rehabilitation of adult offenders and children who are in conflict with the law.  Prayas had approached Arpan for counselling for a group of boys who were involved in an incident of Child Sexual Abuse. Currently, Arpan is working with this group of 8 children who are between the age group of 11 to 15 years. The focus of the initial sessions was rapport building, and this was followed by a pre-assessment that has been conducted. The future work with these boys will involve group sessions as well as individual sessions based on the needs identified in the assessment.

Impact of the programme

The impact post multiple counselling sessions has been primarily in the area of:

• Gathering the strength and language to communicate  about past child sexual abuse experience
• Reduction/riddance of approval seeking behaviour which is one of the key indicators of trauma
• Improvement in assertive communication and reduction in either passive/aggressive behaviour
• Reduction/riddance of impulsive behaviour especially stealing, self-harm behaviors as they have improved impulse control, learnt delayed gratification, have developed resources to deal and express negative feelings
• Development of trust in others and overcoming suspicion
• Self-awareness of feelings and expressive of one’s needs helping in inter-personal communication

CSA Prevention and Training

Arpan also focuses on building the capacity of the teachers, NGO staff, Duty Bearers etc. in order to sensitise and empower their staff with adequate information and support on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse with the objective of having more trained professionals working on the cause.

Outreach of the Programme

Arpan conducted its first International training at Bhutan. UNICEF Bhutan invited Arpan to conduct training for 83 School Guidance Counsellors appointed by the Government of Bhutan. Arpan contributed in the planning, designing and implementation of psychosocial support and care for vulnerable children and adolescents living in boarding schools across Bhutan, to support schools in Bhutan by training counsellors and providing a generic overview of prevention and response work with children, case management as well as engaging with other stakeholders and to facilitate creating a space to brainstorm ideas to develop psychological intervention activities in the school. A lot of time was invested in creating content to meet the needs of the group.

In the last 6 months, the training vertical provided services in capacity building ofeachers, counsellors and caregivers working in the area of disability. We conducted training for schools like Victoria Memorial School for Blind, MCGM Special Needs Children Department and organisations like Jai Vakeel Foundation for Intellectually Disability Children and partners of Atma. The experience has been very intense but fruitful as we had to invest a considerable amount of time in collating information for this special group of children and get ourselves trained in how to respond to their needs before conducting these sessions.

We piloted our Counselor’s Module for the 1st time with 14 mental health professionals.

Through our partnership with Young India (YI), we were able to conduct a 2-day training in Mumbai with 13 participants coming from various parts of India. The session was aimed at giving the participants deeper understanding on the subject. Another training was conducted with YI’s Vadodara chapter.

Academy of Paediatricians, Vadodara Gujarat with The Indian Child Neglect Labor (ICANCL), invited Arpan at the 5th National Conference. Arpan conducted the first session of the conference on creating awareness on child sexual abuse. The principal aim of the conference was to raise awareness, sensitise and train all the professionals on how to identify, address, treat & manage “Child Sexual Abuse” with a multi-disciplinary approach.  

Apart from conducting a number of awareness sessions for various stakeholders, we have been able to include few sessions with 3 corporates as well.

Impact of the Programme

Feedback from Participants

“Disclosures, self-care, working with stakeholders and understanding their challenges were very helpful for me. I work with a lot of children with substance abuse, and initially, they are honest and confess about their abuse. But later they go back on it. I can relate to what you said on this. I am carrying so much of knowledge from this session which will remain with me lifelong. Thank you very much"- one of the participants from Bhutan 

“It was such a worthy and soul-satisfying experience to meet such fantastic likeminded people. Most of the time I felt very heavy listening to all the real life incidences narrated by the facilitator. Even though we have been sensitising many children on safe and unsafe touch for the past few years and are familiar with the topic, this 2-day training made us realise that handling and making children understand CSA is much more sensitive and complicated than we think. It has to be implemented more systematically. Also, we got more clarity on how we should react if we come across any such cases”- Ms. Fatima Bathool, National Chair, Young India

Challenges Encountered across all Programmes

Personal Safety Education Programme:

Recruitment has always been a challenge especially at the level of field staff. The reason being the PSE programme requires highly skilled individuals that can connect with children and adults and be able to have a group and individual interaction on a sensitive issue like CSA. In the last six months although we have managed to recruit 13 Programme officers and 5 counsellors, yet a few positions remain vacant and recruitment is ongoing. To mitigate this, we have 3 to 4 recruitment cycles in a year and our training team that has intensive induction sessions to ensure that the recruits have the same quality of delivery as the existing team members.

To ensure that we don’t lose the opportunity of interaction with the Grade X children since schools were reluctant to have an intensive PSE programme with their busy schedule, Arpan created a one-hour module for all Grades in the last quarter of last year.  This change of strategy to introduce one hour sessions was introduced only in the context of a Step Up school and not in the case of PSE with new schools. This option of one hour sessions was used as a last resort and only in a situation where Arpan will lose the opportunity to work with that group of children otherwise. 

This year, through the One Hour Module, we were able to reach out to many of the schools that had refused the programme last year due to time constraints. However one of the challenges that we faced in some of the step-up schools was that the number of new children in these schools were high. This was due to various factors like schools dropouts, new admissions in higher grades and employment-related transfers of parents etc. Arpan trainers have experienced that the One Hour Module needs much more intensive work and also an extension of time if it needs to be implemented with the new children who have not undergone PSE previously. Thus currently we are in the process of assessing this further and exploring the modifications required in the One Hour Module, for Step Schools where we may have a large number of new children.

Mental Health Services

Since it is a specialised area of work, it is difficult to get the right in-house counsellors and also external partner counsellors for miscellaneous cases.

CSA Prevention and Training

Arpan had initiated a year-long training programme for Duty bearers of the Konkan Zone, Department of Women and Child Development, Maharashtra in February 2017. Due to the transfer of various officials, we have been able to conduct only 2 sessions this year. We are currently in talks with the department to re-start these training sessions.

Future Plans

The year 2017-18 is a year of strengthening our systems and processes to ensure that as the organisation grows, we have our foundation, which provides much-needed support to the organisation, strong enough to cope with the scale of our operations.

With this objective, we are in the process of setting up a Data Management System which will ensure that data so painstakingly collected over 10 years is not lost. It will also help in analysis and interpretation of data to develop future strategies and ensure achievement of organisational objectives.

We are also in the process of strengthening our support operations by enlisting the support of specialists in Finance and Human Resource Management to have better processes in place that can support scale.

We also have 2 new Advisors on board, Dr. Usha Ram, Professor and Head Department of Public Health & Mortality at IIPS and Ms.Shireen Vakil, Head of Policy and Advocacy at the Tata Trust to guide us in Monitoring and Evaluation and Advocacy respectively going forward.  

In the next six months, Arpan looks forward to continuing the current pace of work and strives to achieve our annual goal. Our plans for the next six months are as follows;

• Complete the recruitment process and fill in all vacancies within the organisation
• Continue to reach out to children in both new classrooms as well as step-up; in the case of step-up schools.
• Continue with long-term psychotherapy in institutions.
• Digitalize Arpan’s resources on CSA and Personal Safety Education Programme to reach out and engage with a wider audience.
• Launch a longitudinal study on Integration of Personal Safety Education Programme in Schools
• Finalize and publish our Grade VII to Grade X PSE modules.
• Finalize and publish modules for the One Hour Programme for Grades VII to X
• Initiate work on Pre Primary modules for Personal Safety.
• Create a personal safety book for children of Pre Primary age group
• Conduct Training and Capacity Building of CBO staff, teachers, trainers, counsellors, NGO professionals.
• Advocating for Psychotherapeutic services and Personal Safety Education programme through networking and meetings.
• Monitoring and Evaluation by conducting on field observation, analysis of pre-post reports.

• PROJECT SUMMARY

Arpan’s flagship programme, the Personal Safety Education (PSE) Programme, comprises of 85% of Arpan’s work. It is one of the core interventions of Arpan that focuses on empowering children with adequate knowledge, attitude, and skills to prevent instances of child sexual abuse as well as to seek support when such an incident has occurred. Arpan conducts this module with children in privately owned and government schools as well as with highly vulnerable groups of children referred by NGOs, and in shelter homes and orphanages. It supports children with counselling, post disclosure, as well as work with children who indulged in sexual misbehaviour so that there is no reoffending. The PSE programme also involves awareness building and skill enhancement of adults (like parents, teachers and institutional caretakers) who are the primary stakeholders and caregivers in a child’s life to create strong safety and support networks around children in their respective environments

Arpan, through the PSE programme, works with schools both privately owned and Government schools. It is always a challenge to get permission from the BMC (The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) to work with Government schools on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse. We have succeeded in getting permission to conduct the Personal Safety Education Programme in 5 BMC Zones this year which are, M West, F North, P south, K Ward, H-East. Since April we have pitched the PSE programme in 64 schools started work in 17 schools. Till the 31st of July, we have reached out to 2601 children, 3171 adults (parents, teachers, service staff).

We aspire to reach out to 8,880 children, parents, teachers and other staff of various socio – economic backgrounds by the end of September 2017.

• TESTIMONIALS OF PERSONAL SAFETY EDUCATION PROGRAMME:

Shraddha Trimbakkar, Principal, Vidya Vikas Mandal Primary School: The work that Arpan has done for students is priceless, and their work is commendable. It is very important for all our students, and we would like to thank Arpan for it. Because of this organisation, the confidence and self-esteem of our children have increased so that they can keep themselves safe. This program has increased their decision-making capabilities.

Surekha Patil, Teacher, Pragnya Bodhini School: I really like the work that the Arpan team has done because I feel like there are some things in our society that people don’t talk about. But the Arpan team works for that cause, and that’s why it’s a good initiative.

• SUCCESS STORIES

A child in the 7th grade, during the individual session, shared a story with the trainer. There was a new boy who recently moved in his area. One day, this new boy, touched the child’s friend’s penis. This incident shook up his best friend. The little boy was very fearful, nervous & became very scared. Seeing these changes in his friend, the child inquired, and his friend narrated the entire incident and told him about the abuse. That’s when the child assured his friend, not to worry as he can and will try to help. He recollected what was taught in the Personal Safety Education lessons and he implemented it in his practical experience by 1st listening to his best friend, not laughing or making fun of him, not making any promises, reassured him that this time they would need to take the help of their elders, thanking him for sharing his feelings and telling him that it was not his fault. The child took the friend to his parents and informed them, about it all, together they went over to the new boy’s house and immediately informed his parents. The child’s best friend’s parents were curious and asked him where he got so much information, and he told them that Arpan NGO had come to his school and given him and his entire class the knowledge and skills to keep themselves safe. His parents felt very proud & happy that the school had invited Arpan to conduct such lessons. The friend’s parents said that they want to take admission for their son in the child’s school itself so that their son could learn about Personal Safety as well and learn how to keep himself safe. The child thanked Arpan and the trainer for giving him the opportunity to help save his friend.

It is stories like this that continue to inspire us to impart the necessary knowledge to develop the skills and attitude of children to help them in keeping themselves safe.