Children & Youth | AWARE India Trust

Our Rationale

In order to foster and build healthy relationships, the contexts in which children and youth live, learn, unlearn and play must also reinforce healthy relationship skills. Promoting healthy relationships (i.e., relationships that are based on trust, mutual understanding, respect and equality) throughout the lifespan is critical to ensuring social well-being in our communities. These relationships include those between parents and their children, between friends and peers, between intimate partners, between girls and boys, between all genders, between men and women, and between employers and employees. Consequences of unhealthy relationships include child maltreatment, bullying, adolescent violence, dating violence, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, family violence and elder abuse.

Our Response

Since 2015, AWARE has worked in partnership with government, universities, academics and schools, NGOs and community-based organizations, to advance a primary prevention approach focused on building the capacities and skills to promote healthy relationships. We started to work with children #CatchingThemYoung with an intent of providing them with age-appropriate knowledge at right time so they do not necessarily unlearn just how almost all grownups does now.

In 2018, after 3 years of intervention with children and their parents and caregivers protecting them from sexual violence, we have found that we need to address this issue in a comprehensive way by educating and empowering children with more nuanced and child friendly approach to impart a deeper understanding about their bodies, bodily changes and the emotional development which influences and impacts their attitudes and behaviors that ensures their safety and well-being. This is how we explored the comprehensive sexuality health education as a solution to address all the interrelated issues to keep children protected from any form of gender-based and sexual violence.

To support this approach, we work with parents, caregivers and teachers as primary responders creating them as safe spaces for the target children group. We curated programs to make it more interesting and fear-free by using the arts medium, play methodology and experiential learning-based camps. We explored the life skills-based curriculum program to sustain the conversations as a yearlong intervention with the same group for a long-term impact which resulted in better outcomes.

In 2021, we designed Safe Space Club for Youth, a comprehensive, gender-transformative approach for students in colleges and universities to equip with necessary skills, knowledge and tools to feel safe and empowered, but also to positively inspire and influence their peers and working population in their future. We reach out with a monthly calendar in offering sensitization workshops, awareness sessions, campaigns at their campus, also offering them internships, field work and placement opportunities.