Arpan

District

Thane

Palghar

Mumbai

Mumbai Suburban

States

Maharashtra

Personal Safety Education (PSE) Program: Arpan’s PSE program is an innovative school-based program that approaches the issue of child sexual abuse with a prevention and intervention lens. The program is currently available for Grade 1 to Grade 10 (6-16 year-olds) and modules for additional age groups are being developed and piloted. Arpan partners with schools to deliver the program, trains adult caregivers on keeping children safe, and trains children to prevent instances of CSA & seek support if an incident occurs. After classroom sessions, Arpan works individually with each child in the classroom to provide a safe space for disclosure, and, on disclosure, works to stop all ongoing abuse, and counsels and heals the child of their trauma. Arpan also works to counsel and heal children who indulge in sexual misbehavior. Additionally, under the PSE “step-up” program, Arpan reaches out after 2-3 years to the children worked with earlier, to conduct the program again, provide additional age-appropriate information, and provide another safe space to disclose, and counsel and heal all children who disclose.

We seek to bring sustained focus on child protection at the systemic level & help align Government policies & programs to integrate child safety material in standard educational curricula. This helps mainstream child protection & makes CSA prevention & support services standard across the country. We advocate & work closely with Government duty bearers, influencers, & decision-makers at the National, State, & District levels. Arpan is the go-to organization on child sexual abuse for key Ministries at the National level (Education and Health), the National Council of Educational Research and Training, and multiple State Governments (eg. Maharashtra, Delhi, Goa, Chhatisgarh). With Arpan’s sustained efforts to build engagement, National/ State Governments are committed as never before and our content is integrated into a few key educational curricula, with the potential to reach millions of children. We also work closely with several non-Governmental organizations. Alongside curriculum integration, we train & handhold teachers who can in turn undertake the onward implementation of the PSE program with adults & children in their ecosystem. We work to build capacity of paraprofessionals/ school counselors/ others on aspects such as counseling skills, neurobiology & trauma related to CSA, to hone their skills to respond to CSA effectively. Based on the needs of partner organizations, we train either trainers who directly work with children, and/or master trainers who in turn train trainers who in turn work with children.

To considerably scale up and deliver Arpan’s core personal safety messages to children across the country, Arpan has leveraged technology & built multilingual PSE e-modules, available free-to-use at www.arpanelearn.com, a fun and impactful online interface. We currently have modules available for 4-7-year-olds, 8-10-year-olds, and 11-13-year-olds in English, Hindi and Marathi, and modules for 14 to 18 years age groups are under development. Modules will also soon be translated into numerous regional languages. We undertake strategic partnerships to increase the uptake of the digital content – for example, our e-learning modules are currently integrated onto DIKSHA (a national platform for school education by the NCERT and Ministry of Education), TCSion (TCS’s digital learning platform) and PM E-Vidya channel (Doordarshan) in various states.