Safeguarding and protection is the right of every person and must be our collective responsibility.
The denial and silence around abuse and violence especially in the context of children, make it necessary to initiate conversations with everyone. Child sexual abuse, corporal punishment, online abuse and exploitation, child marriage, child labour are just some of the forms in which abuse is faced, witnessed or experienced by children in communities everywhere. Young adults face risks in personal relationships, workplaces, online and in public places. We believe that the first step in this journey of individual and collective responsibility is an awareness and acknowledgment of risks faced every day, around us. Pahal is the first step. This first conversation helps to achieve the following -
The safety and protection of children and women must be a priority for us as a society. A holistic response to safeguarding and protection of children and women across education, health, livelihoods and overall agency is critical. Schools, community based organisations, colleges thus have a role to ensure this by integrating safety into all their programmes and creating safe spaces within their own communities. Leher is a structured program using appropriate and context specific tools which aims to begin with awareness and capacity building towards being informed, detect and respond to situations of abuse, violence and exploitation and work towards its prevention. The programme envisions integrating safeguarding within all NGOs, schools and other civil society organisations by aiming to -
- Ensure every individual and organisation working in communities must have the relevant information, skills and capacity to ensure safety of children and women from abuse and exploitation.
- Help facilitate practices and programs advancing protection and safeguarding for children and women in organisations and schools
- Build collaborations and partnerships on the ground, recognising children and women as individuals with a holistic set of rights, specifically for their safety and protection.
The Safe Spaces project envisions a structured place where women and children’s physical and emotional safety is respected and where women and children are supported through processes of empowerment to seek, share, and obtain information, access services, express themselves, enhance their psychosocial wellbeing, and more fully realise their rights. It is a space that empowers women and children individually and collectively. The space also initiates a process of building and nurturing collective responsibility in the community towards safety by initiating conversations with diverse stakeholders with the larger vision of building an active and effective community based response mechanism. At the core of the programme are the adolescents or women who evolve into safety champions through the safe space and become the voice for safety in the community.
The project works with a community-based partner organisation and builds their capacity at every step through training, exposure visits and networking.
It often emerges from a Leher intervention.
Live Platform for collaborative learning One of our initiatives to build collective consensus, effort and impact are Baatcheet Live - a platform for practitioners and organizations to come together to create a space for learning, share knowledge and experience and build collective responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of women and children in communities. It is currently a virtual monthly interaction conducted over Zoom, attended by staff members of community-based organizations, teachers, or educators from schools and learning spaces, across India.
In keeping with our conviction toward's evidence-based interventions and impact measures, research is an approach and a tool being used within and across all our interventions. The attempt is to initiate small and large-scale studies in collaboration with partner communities to identify good practices, emerging new risks, and gaps in tackling these risks.