For months, a neighbour had been touching nine year old Neha inappropriately, calling it affection. She had no words for what was happening, so at school she grew withdrawn and stopped concentrating. Then her teacher, trained by Arpan, taught a lesson on personal safety in the class: it is never okay for anyone to touch, look at, or talk about a child’s private parts, except to keep them clean and healthy. For the first time, Neha understood that what had happened to her was wrong, not her fault, and that she could say no, get away, and ask for help.
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Her teacher, trained to spot the quiet signs of a child in distress, gently helped her open up, first to her, then to her father, who had also attended a parent session. He listened, believed her, and filed a police complaint; the neighbour was arrested. Weeks later, Neha saw a bus conductor behaving inappropriately with a boy nearby, and told her father without hesitation. One training. Three adults equipped. Two children were protected.
Stories like Neha’s are why I founded Arpan in 2007. No child deserves to go through sexual abuse. I understood we had to tackle this issue at its root: not wait to respond after abuse happens. In India nearly 1 in3 girls and 1 in 7 boys compared to compared to 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 7 boys globally, experience sexual abuse before the age of 18 and most stay silent. We need to give children the knowledge to know what abuse is, the language to speak about it and know what to do about it, and give the adults around them the training to respond calmly, without blame, when a child speaks up.
That belief has taken Arpan from a handful of schools to a movement. We’ve trained over 300,000 teachers, reaching more than 3 million children and a million parents. Ninety percent of children in our programme can now correctly identify an unsafe situation, know what to do and teachers trained by us are twice as likely to have handled a child’s disclosure.
With this kind of impact, I want every child in India to learn that their body belongs to them, and that there is a grown up whose job it is to listen calmly and help them stop it. Not a few thousand children. Every child.
I believe we finally have a model to get there. Every state’s education department already has Cluster Resource Coordinators (CRCs) who train teachers across government schools. We layer personal safety training onto that existing structure: coordinators train teachers, teachers reach children and parents. We plan to train 12,000 CRCs across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand, three of India’s largest states, who will train 750,000 teachers and they will in turn reach 12 million children every year, in 200,000 government schools, double the public schools in the United States.It would be the world’s first government-led system of its kind, at population scale.
If three states in India can protect 12 million children a year, it becomes a blueprint any country can use. No child, anywhere, should carry what Neha had to carry alone.
We are at a pivotal moment. A respected global funder has stepped forward with a matching commitment of 2.5 million USD to help take this from plan to reality. We’re also in conversation with some of the world’s largest funders about what comes next. We are looking for support to help match this 2.5 million USD. Would you want to stop children experiencing what happened to Neha and so many millions of children?
If yes, write to me at pooja@arpan.org.in , and let’s find time to talk.
