FOREWORD

Dear Friends,

As Leher grew out of infancy into our 6th year, we learned more and more that children get extremely destabilized by the challenges before society; that they, their families and communities have great potential to effect change. While there will always be need to rehabilitate children who have been harmed, community led preventive initiatives are invaluable to address root causes towards change of societal status quo.

Leher’s experimental field site in Madhubani demonstrating community led child protection has completed five years and offers itself as a living site of learning and practice. Village Child Protection Committees (VCPC) and children’s groups have grown into leadership groups that have reach and influence across their entire communities. We are now able to visualize preparing communities to take complete charge. This requires a shift in gear for us, requiring focus to be added on giving them more technical and managerial skills, strengthening the system’s capacity to respond to proactive and interested communities. The case stories documented in this report help us see communities’ willingness to problem solve, devise techniques , step up to take on more complex issues with a rational approach and to negotiate with the system for their children. Communities’ work on keeping their children safe does not end, it remains a work in progress; the idea is to create self-sustaining mechanisms who undertake to do the same.

Leher’s partnership in Maharashtra with UNICEF and the State Government came to fruition with the creation of a toolkit for village child protection committees comprising of eight instructional films and five IEC materials to orient members of committees across 40000 villages in the state of Maharashtra. The toolkit is foundational- providing understanding of concepts related to rights, laws, and functional skills to VCPC to enable them to embark on a self-led journey towards shifts in thought and practice for child protection. The toolkit also includes a manual to train child protection managers of District Child Protection Units (DCPU) and NGOs on understanding and skills for how to facilitate and support VCPC in their districts. The subsequent work would focus on dissemination and orientation of child protection functionaries across the districts on making the materials accessible to the communities. Going forward, Leher aims to form collaborations across states to spread interest, knowledge and demand for community led child protection.

This year, Leher entered into a significant collaboration with UNICEF to design a public engagement initiative towards creating a culture of raising voices against violence and for child protection. #THEMINORPROJECT grew out of a combination of factors: the last five years of Leher’s work on communicating and popularizing understanding and engagement on child protection among younger cohorts of the population, in positions of influence who in normal course of their lives are unconcerned with children’s issues; and through collaborative interventions with civil society on advocacy for laws for protection of children, where we found the lay public was completely apathetic and unconcerned about children’s issues.

Leher’s work communicating child protection yielded some significant collaborations with writers, photographers while also exploring several new formats and a noticeable increase in engagements, collaborations and following. Our guest writer’s corner had features from influential members of civil society, parent community, human rights activists. Little Humans, our campaign on

bringing voices of children to the centre of discussions, explored important issues of displacement, eviction, life in the red-light area and general invisibility of issues of underprivileged children through collaborations with prominent civil society organizations across the country. Through collaborations with prominent photographers such as the photography collective, Leher was able to reach a wide audience to show how floods, conflict, scrap picking affect the lives of children.

Leher’s vision is for caring families alert communities and responsive governments to come together for the rights and protection for all children. Six years in the field we feel that our contributions though small have been meaningful and we count on your continued good wishes and support. Leher intends to take forward our aim of creating knowledge, build on ideas that can be scaled and embedded within existing institutions and systems.

With regards, Kajol Devasmita Menon & Nicole Rangel Menezes

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF CHILD MARRIAGE WITH THEIR 4TH DAUGHTER

Reema Kumari completed class 10 successfully and was looking forward to her higher studies when her parents fixed her marriage. Reema was the fourth of five daughters. Stressed with the responsibility and expenses of marriage for five daughters, her parents were in a hurry. The three sisters before Reema were married when they were still children, but Reema had dreams of building a future for herself on education. She shared this information with her cousin who was an active member of the girls’ group. Reema’s cousin further shared this in the girls group meeting. The girls group called the block facilitator to seek her guidance on next course of action in this case. The facilitator advised the girls group to inform the VCPC, and to support the VCPC in the intervention. The girls group went to the VCPC and together they approached Reema’s parents to persuade them to cancel the marriage. The VCPC implored the parents to think ahead of the future of their daughter if she is educated and not limit her happiness by getting her married against her wishes. They spoke to the parents about the different ways in which child marriage can result in harm to their daughter. The VCPC also educated them about the legal age of marriage and told them that they would be acting in violation of the law. After the intervention of the VCPC, the marriage was called off. Reema went back to her studies after the incident, and is class 12 now. She plans on going to college. The VCPC keeps checking on the parents on regular intervals and they are supportive of Reema’s plans of studying further. The girls group members are in regular touch with Reema who has started participating in their meetings.

STRENGTHENING CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEMS IN MAHARASHTRA

The Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) has been implemented in Maharashtra since 2011. The scheme introduced non-formal voluntary citizen’s committees for child protection (VCPC) at the village, block and district with urban equivalents, where duty bearers and ordinary citizens are encouraged to come together for child protection at the community level. VCPC have potential to transform communities: attitudes, behaviour, bring protection and safety for all children, influence spending of public funds on children at the village level, support families obtain entitlements, invoke and connect upwards to the formal child protection system when necessary. Nearly 42000 out of 43665 CPCs have been formalized at the village level, and 288 out of 355 block level committees have been established across the state, however these were not functional.

Aimed at scale-up of VCPCs to as decentralized, self-sustaining community owned mechanisms a partnership was initiated in 2017 between the State Government of Maharashtra, Maharashtra State Child Protection Society, UNICEF and Leher which continued into 2018. The emphasis is to increase the child protection knowledge base and create an effective synergy between the child protection system, communities and young people through development of knowledge and to build technical competence of grassroot organizations based in Maharashtra to lead child protection work in the state.