Concept Statement:
I am working on developing interactive games/ tools based on the content of the Olakh Sparshachi (Introduction to Touch) program by Jnana Prabodhini Samvadini to facilitate easy communication between teachers and students. Child sexual abuse is a huge problem in India, especially when there is a greater probability of a child getting victimized due to their socio economic status. It is important that in such communities children know about what it means when someone is behaving inappropriately towards them, how they can seek help and who they can talk to.
Initial interview:
Sven suggested conducting an expert interview for to start the project with, which luckily for me is my mother. Based on the discussion with Sven where he suggested to conduct a detailed interview to understand the nature of the program, what they do, their previous research, what the situations and contexts are in the schools they go to, what technological access they have, any potential ideas or requirements and so on. It was also intended to establish a collaborative and professional relationship with her since she would be the primary source of contact throughout the project.
About the program:
The “Introduction to Touch” program initially started to spread awareness among children of ages 7-12 about sexual abuse, consent, privacy, health and safety. The program was first run in 2017-2018 as a research project which targeted 12 sub-districts of Pune city in India. 700 teachers were trained to conduct 30 minute sessions and reach nearly 50,000 students in these sub-districts. The teachers were also made aware of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POSCO) Act in India. A big part of this research was focused on understanding the teachers’ awareness and knowledge on these subjects. They were assessed pre and post the training and the results indicated a drastic improvement in their awareness. Some teachers also mentioned how they were approached previously by students informing about abusive they faced and they were now aware of how they would handle these cases. The main aim of the project was making the local teachers/volunteers able enough to spread the awareness on their own.
The current program for the next two years involves an approach which along with spreading awareness to the students, sessions would be conducted for people around them including their parents, school administrative staff, cleaning and other staff, auto-rickshaw drivers and so on. The program would also address online harassment and ways to avoid it. This new approach is called the 360 degree approach.
One of the most important aspects of this program is to be able to communicate complicated and difficult concepts without generating fear in the minds of the children about the people around them while still being able to remain cautious and reach out to the right people in case of any problems. The content is structured in a way that it does not name the relationship of the adult who could potentially misbehave but keeps it more general as a known or unknown person who can be capable of doing that.
Brief structure of the program:
Erik Erikson (1963) proposed different stages of psychosocial development where in each stage an individual goes through a psychological crisis which has some negative or positive outcome for that individual. These crisis occur due to the conflict between psychological needs of the individual and the needs of the society.
Based on Erik Erikson’s stages of child development, grades 1 & 2 will have the same content, explaining the concept of good and bad touch at a very basic level and how to say no if someone does something inappropriate. Similarly grades 3 & 4, 5 & 6 will have content designed to their age groups which cover the concepts in an increasing level of detail. The general structure involves a story to begin with and then a game which is followed by talking about the following topics:
How to respond to improper behavior by another known/ unknown adult?