Prioritising the safety of students, especially girls, following their visit to homes in the wake of the summer vacation, the state’s ST&SC Development, Minorities, and Backward Classes Welfare Department has launched a massive awareness campaign to make the girls aware of good touch and bad touch.

The Department has also asked the Sexual Harassment Committees (POCSO Committees) at these hostels to be on alert and cross-verify facts by the officials concerned so that during the vacations these things could be monitored completely.

It may be mentioned here that even after having a robust reporting mechanism in the SSD hostels, there are still sporadic instances of teenage pregnancies, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, etc.

The objective is to educate the girls, giving them the tip that unless they are cautious and alert, abuse, sexual harassment, and teenage pregnancies will continue to haunt the psyche, especially when they are staying away from their hostels during vacations.

Experts dealing with such problems of adolescent girls often point out that it’s the close family friends, relatives, and even kin playing the spoilsports and the little ones suffer. Hence, to make the awareness level felt with 1,736 residential SSD schools across Odisha with approximately 5,800 hostels and more than 5 lakh boarders, of which more than 50 percent are girls, the Department often finds it quite challenging to handle the situation.

The vacations are the occasion where the incidents are likely to shoot up as the parents remain out with their livelihood and the girls at home remain vulnerable.

“We have developed a clear strategy of paying attention through our listening windows and an idea given by our own staff during a “Mo Parikalpana” meet (a people connect initiative) to consider this strategy so that from this summer vacation the monitoring of the girls and awareness about good touch and bad touch could be a major focus area,” Secretary ST & SC Development, Minorities and Backward Classes Welfare Department Roopa Roshan Sahoo said.

The ST and SC residential schools are run jointly by the SSD Department and the School and Mass Education Department. However, the SSD Department has taken the lead and asked the trained matrons and assistant superintendents to conduct counselling sessions on good and bad touch, early (child) marriage, teenage pregnancies, and how to deal with any such situations, abuse or harassment and promptly report the same as this would help the authorities in solving the problem, added the official.