This is an article of what Yashna Singhvi, my friend from Hyderabad and Me, Kashfa Haque from Calcutta went on to initiate in a completely unfamiliar city to us – Chennai. Pursuing our Masters in Social Entrepreneurship from Madras School of Social Work, we often discussed coming up with innovative models of change for the most critical of social issues. One such issue which was extremely close to both of our hearts was child abuse.
And that was it! Yashna and I got into a lot of talking, brainstorming, reading, researching, travelling, networking and finally initiating our very own social enterprise- Child Aid Project in January 2019. The journey since then has been overwhelming.
I could not find any specific cause why CAP should be read about here in YKA, except for the sole reason that there is a dire need for initiatives like ours to be promoted for the sake of creating healthier and safer lives for our children. This is an initiative that needs to be shared with as many parents, caregivers and institutes as possible in order to direct conversations to spaces where it is most needed.
Today in India, where social agencies keep struggling explicitly to implement a treatment rather than a preventive policy in the face of high recidivism, it has been quite a task to combat the emergency and chronic needs related to child abuse. Such is where CAP identifies a social in-equilibrium and strives to work on. As the saying goes- ‘Prevention is better than Cure’. We at CAP, strive to opt for similar models of preventing child abuse in the first place.
Child Aid Project (CAP) became a social enterprise initiated by a team of young social leaders including entrepreneurs, counselling psychologists, designers and other creative people who have an inclination towards driving social change. Today, at CAP, we work towards child abuse (emotional, physical, neglect and sexual) prevention strategies, wherein we focus on:
– Reducing particular risk factors/conditions that are associated with child abuse and neglect.
– Promoting protective factors including circumstances in families and communities that increase the health and well-being of children and families.
At CAP, we design, develop and deliver early intervention resources including specialized tabletop games and workshop models on ‘Resilience Building’ that instil skills, knowledge and techniques that teach children and their parents, through play, about child safety and its protection from abuse, violation and neglect.
By engaging with families and communities, CAP ensures an increase in the health and well-being of children and their immediate adults as a proactive family system. These act as attributes that serve as buffers, helping parents who might otherwise be at risk of neglecting their children, to find resources, support, or coping strategies that allow them to parent effectively, even under stress. Our age-specific games models are designed to develop and enhance children’s life skills and resilience building.
Children are not just our future but our most prized present. Our treatment towards our children defines our character as a society. Abuse to a child manipulates and twists their natural instinct to love and trust. More so, when in spite of the knowledge of such a crime, we choose to be mere bystanders, our children’s innocent lives are belittled and mocked again and again. At CAP, we look at preventing abuse and neglect to children as a shared obligation-and in such an endeavour, pledge to join in the work of uplifting and safeguarding our youngest individuals and ensuring they are limited by nothing but the size of their dreams and the range of their aspirations.
How Can You Help?
In the last few months, our focus has been on underlining and putting into action long term goals that focus on lasting change for children. In order to ensure our commitment to making actionable differences to our children, we have decided to address the most crucial issues affecting them. One such particularly important concern CAP is currently initiating to work on is the need for building resilience in children who might otherwise be at risk of being exposed to the four forms of child abuse.
We recognise Resilience Building as a specific focus to be prioritised in schools for both boys and girls because this would help accomplish the unmet need of creating and sustaining an enabling, safe and proactive environment for children. Therefore, we believe that collaborating with institutions, who commit to the vision of eliminating social inequity with regard to children’s right, will help ameliorate the challenges that children and society face with regard to combating and preventing child abuse.
Some of these institutes belong to lower income communities wherein the requirement for specialised extended support and effort is quite high. Our team seeks to conduct committed workshop sessions with the children of such backgrounds and communities in order to help them and their parents build resilience and be more proactive towards child abuse prevention. These workshops aim to instil interactive learning modules that teach them about:
- Knowing their resilient abilities
- Identifying and building supportive relationships
- Managing emotions more efficiently
- Creating opportunities for personal challenge
- Building a sense of responsibility and autonomy
All the above components help a child feel more in control of their environment and make it easy for them to thrive and ‘bounce back!’