Enfold Proactive Health Trust

Enfold Proactive Health Trust is a Bengaluru based nonprofit working to prevent sexual and gender based violence against children and adults. It was co-founded in 2001 by Dr Sangeeta Saksena and Dr Saldanha to promote gender equity, sexuality and personal safety education, and it has since grown into an organisation that works across prevention, survivor support, disability inclusion, restorative practices and legal research.

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Its central position is that child sexual abuse is preventable, and that prevention depends on adults and children being able to talk about sexuality, consent and safety without shame or silence. Rather than working only with children, Enfold trains the people around them: teachers, parents, police, doctors, judges, counsellors and child care institution staff. It also works directly with governments and universities to build this content into professional curricula and state child protection policy, so that the change outlasts any single workshop.

Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka.

Major Areas of Work

• Prevention and education: Gender equity, comprehensive sexuality and personal safety education for children, college students and adult stakeholders, delivered by trained facilitators.

• Disability inclusion: Sexuality and personal safety education adapted for children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities, Autism Spectrum Disorder and sensory impairments.

• Support and rehabilitation: Direct accompaniment of child survivors of sexual abuse and their families through medical examination, police reporting and the criminal trial, until the case closes and the child has moved on.

• Restorative practices: Circle based work inside the juvenile justice system and in schools to build community, teach social and emotional learning, and repair harm rather than punish it.

• Research and legal advocacy: Studies on how child protection laws are actually implemented, plus policy engagement, guidelines, standard operating procedures and handbooks for the child protection workforce.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Suvidha: Personal safety and sexuality education for children and young persons with disabilities, built around the Suvidha Suraksha kit of visual teaching and learning aids and the Suvidha Sparsh kit with braille books, audio files and sign language videos.

• Demystifying Sexuality: A handbook and reference series that adapts sexuality education to specific professional courses, with separate editions for students and teachers of nursing, social work, psychology and mental health, public health, education (B Ed) and special education, published in English, Hindi and several Indian languages.

• Enfold apps: Three free Android apps built with CDAC (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) and supported by UNICEF. Surakshith covers personal safety rules for 6 to 18 year olds, Bal Suraksha covers preventing and managing child sexual abuse, and Stri Suraksha covers recognising and reporting violence against women. All are available in ten Indian languages.

• Child Rights and Access to Justice Fellowship: A multi year fellowship that places practising advocates as pro bono counsel for children in conflict with the law before Juvenile Justice Boards, with fellows working across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

• Stakeholder training on POCSO and POSH: Structured training for police, medical and judicial personnel, social workers, counsellors, NGOs, corporates and educational institutions on the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and on workplace sexual harassment redressal.

Suvidha is the work Enfold describes as its own first, having pioneered sexuality and personal safety education for children with disabilities in India from 2017. The team builds the teaching materials, trains the adults who use them, and publishes facilitator manuals and social script books, including regional language editions. Enfold states the project has reached over 3,000 parents, teachers and trainers across more than 50 schools and organisations in India through direct training, workshops and online sessions.

Impact

Enfold's own site cites reach of more than 1 million nursing students through its advocacy with the Indian Nursing Council on the nursing curriculum, 2,68,727 children and young adults reached, 1,161 schools, colleges and child care institutions sensitised, 97,710 parents, teachers and support staff sensitised, 19,529 medical, police and judicial personnel trained, 17,346 social workers and counsellors, and 5,858 child care institution staff, Juvenile Justice Board members and government officials worked with. It maintains partnerships with UNICEF, CDAC under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Indian Nursing Council, Christ University and the state governments of Karnataka, Delhi and Telangana, and has contributed to instruments such as the Karnataka State Child Protection Policy.

Leadership

• Dr Sangeeta Saksena, Co-founder

• Renu Singh, Project Director, Suvidha

• Arlene Manoharan, Head, Restorative Practices Team

• Geetha Nair, Consultant, Finance and Operations

Enfold suits people who want to work on child protection at more than one level at once. The same organisation runs classroom facilitation, sits with a child through a POCSO trial, designs teaching aids for children with disabilities, files research on how juvenile justice law works in practice, and trains the police and judges who apply it. Teams are small and multidisciplinary, drawing lawyers, social workers, psychologists, special educators, designers and finance staff, so the work gives unusual exposure to both frontline casework and system level advocacy. It is emotionally demanding work with survivors and with institutions that are slow to change, and it fits people who are steady, comfortable talking plainly about sexuality and abuse, and interested in building capacity in others rather than being the sole expert in the room.