Help prevent sexual abuse of children in India

 “No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can't take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.”

- Ryder Carroll

The above quote resonates entirely with what the first half of 2020-21 has been like for us at Arpan! While we were suddenly put into a situation that no one had anticipated, what stood out clearly for us is the sheer resilience of the organization. We were able to quickly pivot our work online and started initiatives to help people during the pandemic. The past 6 months have no doubt been tough, but having the agility and systems in place allowed us to deliver even during crisis and these unprecedented times.

Personal Safety Education Programme:

Arpan typically implements its Personal Safety Education programme with children and adult caregivers within schools. Personal Safety Education Programme (PSE) is a life skill-based module which teaches children to identify safe and unsafe situations, skills to refuse and get away from incidents of Child Sexual Abuse and seek help. Given that schools were shut all through the first half of the year on account of COVID-19, we quickly decided to reach children and adults online, using Arpan’s digital modules. We have reached out to 2,129 children and 1,562 adult caregivers (parents, teachers, and service staff) in the first 6 months. We also continued to work with children for whom we had enabled disclosures pre-lockdown and continued to provide telephonic counselling to these children and psychoeducation to parents and/or other trusted adults, as required. In this first half of the year, we had a total caseload of 479 cases. We closed 139 cases and the rest are carried forward into HY2.

Training and Advocacy Programme:

Arpan has been focusing on creating awareness, building professional capacity for child protection by conducting training and capacity building initiatives with NGO professionals, Social Workers, Teachers, Institutional staff, Health professionals, Mental Health professionals, Government duty bearers and Corporates. We successfully implemented some critical large scale and strategic trainings online in HY1. Online delivery of trainings created a massive opportunity, enabling us to reach out to many trainees across multiple locations in one go. We trained a total of 10,444 trainees on Child Sexual Abuse/ Personal Safety Education, created awareness for 1,636 individuals, and provided handholding support to 126 individuals who had been trained earlier. 3 key trainings stood out in HY1:

• As part of the National Resource Group of trainers, we trained 330 professionals of the State Resource Group of trainers from 12 Indian states, on the module for Safety and Security against violence and injuries. This is one of the eleven modules which forms the curriculum of the School Health Programme of “Ayushman Bharat”, and it contains Arpan's Personal Safety Messages. Ayushman Bharat is a joint initiative by India’s Ministry of Education (MoE) and Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW) and the reach of the programme is tremendous – it is envisaged to reach 260 million children.

• We trained >7,000 primary school teachers of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation Education Department (NDMC, Delhi).

• We trained 2,100 primary school teachers of the Maharashtra State Council of Education Research & Training (MSCERT).

We also continued to undertake advocacy at the National and State levels.

Digital Learning Programme:

Arpan’s digital platform (www.arpanelearn.com) now houses personal safety modules for 4-7-year-olds, 8-10-year-olds, and 11-13-year-olds. In HY1, we launched the module for 11-13-year-olds in English and the FAQ for Adolescents. We also created abridged modules for 8-10-year-olds in English, Hindi and Marathi and for 11-13-year-olds in English and initiated the process for creating modules for 14-16-year-olds. For enabling higher outreach, we sought and sealed partnerships with existing platforms such as DIKSHA, an online teacher training platform of the govt. The total outreach for digital learning (courses completed) in HY1 was 13,369. We will continue to develop partnerships with more such platforms to enable increased outreach.

COVID-related measures undertaken by Arpan

Arpan undertook several measures towards COVID-19 in HY1:

• We expanded our tele-counselling services for CSA survivors, to cover all other mental health concerns such as anxiety associated with the coronavirus. We were able to support 140 clients, of which 76 received therapeutic intervention and 64 were stabilized. We also provided first level counselling support to 48 individuals via chat over our social media handles and our e-learn platform. Some of the callers require regular counselling sessions over longer periods, and we continue to provide this support.

• Due to the COVID situation, many earning members of families lost jobs and many of the schools we work with reached out to us to ask for grocery kits for these families. We started providing these kits that last a family of four for two weeks. We provided 3,197 grocery kits in HY1.

• We supported the mental health of individuals through self-care and parenting resources – we undertook email-based counselling programmes, and disseminated self-care and parenting resources through WhatsApp, impacting 1,095 individuals.

• We undertook efforts to create large-scale awareness on child protection, parenting, and mental health-related subjects, through several webinars with a wide variety of stakeholders – we reached 93,015 individuals through these webinars in HY1.

Besides, we continued to develop the required resources, plan for programme evaluations, and undertake extensive outreach through social media.

Your valuable support and guidance have enabled us to accomplish the above. We hope that together we will continue to sail through the pandemic and continue the important work we do.