The police is there to protect the people. More often than not, the people have always have returned without solving their problems, harassed and with empty pockets.
While systems might be in place, it is being run by people who allow power, violence and corruption to supersede suffering and the need for justice.
While a rare police officer might be honest and people friendly, it is the lower level cadres who have a daily interaction with the common man, who take authority as a given and deal with the common man with utter disdain and insensitivity.
But all this is set to change, thanks to a new exercise taken up by the Mahbubnagar Police. They have launched a “gender fellowship for constable Officers” in partnership with a New Delhi -based organisation People for Parity (PFP), which started on February 28th.
Thirty police constables were handpicked to undergo this training. Mahbubnagar police collaborated with PFP because this organisation works to transform gendered mindsets and beliefs, in the hope that the police will be trained in sensitivity.
While talking about the initiative, Mahbubnagar SP Rema Rajeshwari IPS said that “Gender-based violence means to behave or act with people on the basis of their gender in a way which harms them physically, mentally, financially or sexually. Police being the visible arm of the government, we have a greater responsibility to have empathy towards victims.”
The police constable is normally the first responder whom the victim will meet and so this exercise will see to it that the police is trained to deal with such situations.
The workshop dealt with topics of gender, stereotypes, violence and there were activities where there was participation to make the concept easier to understand.
Role playing also helped and in fact at the end of the first three-day workshop, each participant took up a personal challenge to break a gender stereotype in their own lives.
One person has decided to encourage his wife to take up her dream of becoming a teacher, another person took up tasks at home in order to help his wife out.
Each participant will now going to create a safe reporting environment at the police station, especially when dealing with cases of violence against women (VAW)
In fact the second phase of the gender fellowship commenced in April by initiating dialogues with various stakeholders of the community and police in order to create an enabling environment for issues of violence against women. This included talks with auto drivers’ union, girls from MVS degree college, boys from MVS degree college, women from Mahila Mandal, Marikal, group of men from Marikal mandal.
In fact, after this workshop started the SP saw to it that all police officers took a pledge to refrain from the following practices and to work towards becoming champions of the rights of the victims.
• Sexist interrogation and moral judgements on survivors
• Trivialization of domestic violence and other forms of crime against women in families
• Letting of male offenders easily in cases of CAW like eve-teasing, stalking, cyber crime
• Not providing required information about rights and support services to the survivor.
This sensitisation programme will go on till the end of May.