Seminar on child safety advocates 'listening, trusting' schools

The need of the hour is to have ‘listening’ and ‘trusting’ schools that emerge through holistic community dialogue and participation in the wake of the recent incidents of abuse of schoolchildren. 

This was the consensus endorsed by the lead speakers and more than 150 principals and vice principals of the City’s schools at a seminar on ‘Child Safety in Schools’ here on Friday.

The event was organised by the Deccan Herald group of publications and Allen Career Institute, Kota, Rajasthan.

Lead speaker Shobha Managoli, a clinical psychologist, in her address said various stakeholders related to schooling were at ‘a critical moment’ given the rise in the incidents of abuse in schools.

She took the gathering through a process of asking what exactly the concept of ‘safety’ meant and distinguished between ‘accident’ and ‘incident’. 

Schools have managed to minimise the scope for accidents via infrastructure, transport, playgrounds, toilets and corridors, she said. But incidents of bullying in schools, in school buses, on Internet fora, verbal, physical and sexual abuse have become more visible and evoke both complex questions and feelings of disgust, distrust and anger, she said.

Incidents like these have consequences and impact. There are no final solutions nor prescriptions, but there can be strategies which need to be evolved by schools to create, ‘safe, listening, trusting’ schools, she said.

Safety has to be dealt with at multiple levels and customised to students and schools, and it ought to be a community effort that enables every child to feel that ‘I am cared for, I am listened to,  I am important and wanted’, she said.

Srilakshmi Diwaker, who focuses on community health, touched upon took the global and national and legal frameworks for child rights. She said the focus should be on prevention of child abuse incidents.

Children have a right to ‘voice’ and protection and must be seen as humans with rights and not as powerless ‘victims’, she said. Chaitanya Netkalappa of Deccan Herald also spoke on the occasion.