Darkness cannot drive out darkness only light can. In a world where awareness often comes too late, the ‘Sparsh campaign’ stands as a proactive initiative, aimed at educating young minds about contemporary and critical issues such as bad touch, varied types of harassment, & child sexual abuse.
“What is in a name”- Shakespeare had said; but there is a lot in “How you are touched” -says Naveen Jain, I.A.S., (2001 batch-Rajasthan) who was immensely disturbed by the constant news of child abuse flooding the Newspapers, social media platforms and news-channels but finding hardly any discussions within society on this monstrous issue. It fuelled the vision of Mr. Naveen Jain, IAS, Govt. of Rajasthan, to take the initiative in his individual capacity to empower the children particularly children in our schools, with relevant knowledge and awareness about unsafe touch & risks around.
From here came the noble idea of Sparsh campaign, the brainchild as well as a positive response of Mr. Jain in August 2019, assisted by dedicated and committed volunteers. The campaign was formally commenced on 24 August 2019 approaching few schools with a decent number of children on the very first day. The mandate was to conduct the sessions in schools for the students in classes 1-8 grades, generally in the age group 4-12 years) in understandable language with Audio-visual aids (wherever available) and/or using Flexi-sheets, displaying the messages.
We all keep on noticing negative news on child abuse in the households, molestation at public places etc. and consider it a matter of concern. Just expressing the verbal resentment or publishing anger in form of social media posts can hardly address the basic roots of this widespread subject. We may sometimes initiate an activity or a series of activities in that moment of collective responsibility but giving continuity to such mission requires relentless hard work and extreme positivity. The untiring efforts of Sparsh Volunteers have created a ripple effect at the community level and have proved the immense potential of the concept of volunteerism to society. The way this movement has grown, has surely created a wave of inspiration and motivation for many.
During the last 5 years of Sparsh, while Naveen Jain remained the heart and soul of this mission, the limbs are the volunteers who are gems from different walks of life and arenas. Mr. Jain has taken himself more than one thousand sessions, training the interested volunteers and interacting with children in their classes. In order to run a smooth mission, he chose “Saturday for Society” path to propagate the message of using one holiday in the week for social causes. Volunteers have taken the responsibility of accessing the schools, organizing the talks on child abuse, surpassing the logistical challenges and thus creating a route to broadened smiles and building an environment of safety all around.
Sparsh campaign was thus introduced to spread the light of awareness about different facets of ‘good touch and bad touch’ in order to ensure safer childhood. It cannot be argued that the pedophile predators pry on the innocence and ignorance of children they target. Initially it was decided to take Sparsh campaign on a mission mode with the target of covering one-lakh children within one year. The first few sessions happened in Jaipur City and then demand poured in from rural parts of Jaipur. As social workers started knowing about the objective of the campaign, need was felt to take the sessions to other districts. With this need in view, a district-wise network was formed in next 7 months. The plethora of NGO workers, teachers, interested selfless persons from various fields, such as medicine, education, law, social sector, et cetera, each contributed in the unique way to the conceptualization of the Sparsh campaign. During this time period, many significant developments took place like giving the name to the mission; designing the logo and tagline; creation of social media platforms using Facebook and Whatsaap; finalization of the contents for the sessions and also the methodology.
The kinesthetic skills were incorporate to the max with the deployment of technique, such as icebreaking session, role-play, storytelling and other techniques deployed creatively by the Sparsh champions. Thus the Sparsh campaign began to spread its wings embracing the children under its secure fold safeguarding childhood. To keep a track of the number of children benefited by Sparsh campaign, an attendance certificate was sought from every school by the Sparsh volunteers; the same was then uploaded via a Google form to keep a record of the beneficiaries. Sparsh sessions were successfully being conducted in 20 districts of Rajasthan and had already crossed, the mark of sensitizing more than six lakh children in more than 2000 schools by February 2020.
It is an irony that we are least concerned about this “hidden” evil that general awareness is extremely low about the various trends and facts of this heinous reality. No-reporting of the majority of the abuse cases to save the skin of a senior family member, the shocking fact of greater risk hovering on boys (more than 50% of the reported cases) and significant incidents being done by relatives/known persons as far as child-abuse is concerned; are just some of these grueling truths. Initially, various co -education Schools inquired the Sparsh volunteers often whether boys should be a part of the awareness sessions. Under Sparsh, boys in the age group of 4-12 years were made to be a part of these sessions and as a result, a safety circle was built around both boys and girls. Mr. Jain decided that something more is needed to be done in this direction. Thus a new animated movie “Sandesh” featuring a boy as the protagonist and victim of child abuse was created. This movie is now an important part of Sparsh sessions to convey the firm message that even boys can be victims of sexual abuse. This animation movie disseminates many other important lessons and it successfully narrates the crucial takeaways in the easiest possible manner.
“Out of adversity comes opportunity” (Benjamin Franklin).
When it appeared that everything was streamlined, a new challenge was posed before Sparsh campaign with the advent of Corona and closing of schools. It would be worthwhile to mention one research from Corona times, related to the menace of child-abuse. An article- The silent crisis of child abuse in the COVID‐19 pandemic: A scoping review by Zahra Karbasi, Reza Safdari, and Parisa Eslami claimed that there were increased risks of child abuse in the situation of lockdown as a result of Corona outbreak. Mission Sparsh took this as a new challenge and the campaign now switched to online mode. The online sessions enabled Sparsh to break yet another shackle and break boundaries. Sparsh sessions were now being conducted not only in Rajasthan, but also other states through the accessibility of the online mode. The online sessions also coaxed Sparsh to include the students beyond eighth standard under its mentorship. In many cases, even the parents were also made a part of these online sessions.
Mr. Jain and volunteers strongly felt it was imperative that the contents, initially crafted should be revised more often to include many new safety concerns to make it always relevant and contemporary. Taking clues from the real cases, new interesting slides and stories were included in the session-plan. Some schools on visits for sessions revealed some very disturbing and sensational things, courtesy teenagers students from senior classes (9-12 grades) and demanded some contents for advising them suitably. A brainstorming was held in the leadership of Mr. Jain and there all volunteers were unanimous that Sparsh mission needs a special module as the earlier content didn’t suffice for the teenagers who were not included in Sparsh campaign till now. It was deemed appropriate to find many relevant issues and separate contents including a power point presentation was curated specially for this target group. Taking the mission a step further, a module was created in April 2022 for in-service teachers to guide their students and it was brilliantly used in collaboration with many districts like Dausa, Pratapgarh, Sriganganagar, Bikaner, Bhilwara & Jaipur. Then another development was creating the special contents for motivating and training B.Ed students i.e. budding teachers of tomorrow. This was also launched in the year 2022 successfully with positive response from many reputed colleges.
These two modules (for In-service and budding teachers) proved beneficial as the biggest opportunity was coming for the Mission. Mr. Naveen jain was appointed the Secretary for the department of School education of Rajasthan in May 2023 and this enabled Sparsh to attain its true potential. The moment had arrived finally. More than 65,000 Government schools of Rajasthan were now to be benefited by the much needed awareness about safe and unsafe touch and a new initiative “Surakshit School Surakshit Rajasthan (SSSR) campaign” could be launched in no time because of ready-availability of the contents and proven methodology. As the first step of this campaign, 1200 master trainers were trained personally by Mr. Jain on 11 August 2023, thus laying a very solid foundation. On 26th August 2023, more than 63 Lac students/teachers/parents/other persons in over 65,000 schools of Rajasthan were imparted knowledge about unsafe touch and child abuse. This great accomplishment won the Accolade of World Book of Records, London certification and it was widely appreciated for the quality of the sessions.
What makes this Sparsh campaign more unique is that this wonderful campaign which has completed five years now does not even have a formal office. It is a paperless, staff-less, no-finance load, hierarchy-less voluntary, self-driven campaign which thrives on the notion of “Saturday for society”. Many dedicated volunteers have been so attached to the cause that they don’t leave any chance to spread the session and its contents beyond the borders of Rajasthan. As a result, Sparsh campaign also has its sessions conducted in off-line mode, in Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat, Manipur, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, New Delhi and Uttarakhand. We are confident that our society will take interest in ensuring a better and a safer future for our future generations.
We remain inspired to do more and more and we all see a dream of “Save Childhood: Save Innocence”.
We (I) have miles to go before we (I) sleep (Robert Frost)
