NIMHANS programme educates around 25,000 students on gender, personal safety

NIMHANS doctors conduct gender and safety program in Bengaluru schools, reaching 25,000 children, ending this month.

A gender and personal safety sensitisation programme taken up by doctors from NIMHANS in government schools of Bengaluru has reached close to 25,000 children since May, 2022.

The campaign run by a team led by Eesha Sharma, Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NIMHANS, is ending this month. Funded by the Safe City Project of the Bengaluru City Police, under the Centre’s Nirbhaya scheme, the campaign was taken up in collaboration with Karnataka’s Department of School Education.

Over the last 2.5 years, the team reached 205 schools and as many as 24,925 children and adolescents in the North and South administrative zones of Bengaluru. In addition, 10 batches, including more than 350 teachers, were sensitised to issues of children’s safety and how they could conducively support children in school environments.

“The programme catered to school students from grades 6th to 10th, running in two parallel modules – one for 6th-7th graders focusing primarily on physical and emotional personal safety and the other module for 8th-10th graders that included components of gender, sexuality, roles and relationships, love and attraction, alongside personal safety in related contexts,” Prof Sharma told The Hindu on Wednesday.

The content of the school-based sessions in this programme was based upon two manuals published by the Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Project, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NIMHANS, in 2017.

“The activities used to inculcate gender, sexuality and personal safety skills in children and adolescents have been previously field tested and found to be effective. For the first time the manuals were used to design a classroom-based programme. Through our work on the programme, we have translated the manuals used into Kannada, and they are available through our department for use by anyone who works with children. We have also developed posters on children’s safety that can be displayed as Information, Education and Communication (IEC) in schools,” the doctor said.

The team has now produced an animation film on personal safety for children. The film titled “Nanna Surakshate Nanna Hakku” (My safety is my right) was released and screened for over 200 children and their teachers from nine schools of Bengaluru at NIMHANS on Wednesday.