SOS Children’s Villages India in its work of providing a safe and secure environment to all children in its programs, makes every effort to strengthen processes focusing on Child Safeguarding. Our Child safeguarding work is guided by SOS India Child Protection Policy and we abide by all National legislations on children.
Child safeguarding includes all activities an organisation undertakes to ensure that its co-workers, operations, and programmes do no harm to children and do not expose them to the any risk of harm and abuse. Child safeguarding’ works on 4 pillars of our Child Protection Policy – Awareness, Prevention, Reporting and Responding on child safeguarding issues and concerns.
SOS Children’s Villages India is making a consistent effort to minimise and manage child safeguarding incidents, and has further reinforced efforts through fair and transparent 'reporting and responding' procedure. There is also an 'National Child Protection Committee' which meets monthly with a special focus on child protection issues and strategies to make a safe environment for children under our care.
We have recently introduced 'Helpline Toll Free Number' for our children, the number is managed by National office, hence children can directly connect with us whenever they need help.
A culture of listening and talking to each other also enables one to consider what may be the reason that an assault happened. A culture in which we talk to each other, listen to the issue and analyse it in detail on a regular basis to understand the behaviour towards children and the corrective measures required to prevent the abuse.
There are several regular awareness and prevention activities are organised across 31 projects which includes all the stakeholders, so that each one of us takes the responsibility to keep our children safe.
The organisational principles which inform our response to reported misconduct remain the same, regardless of whether it is a child safeguarding, sexual harassment of an adult, or corruption concern. We are zero tolerant to any kind of child abuse case.