Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) in the 6th year of its association with Centre for Social Research (CSR) has partnered on projects related to Water Conservation and Gender Mainstreaming projects, Safe Cities Project and Gender Sensitization of multiple stakeholders. As part of the Safe Cities Project last year, we undertook trainings of the Police Officials in the states of Karnataka and Jammu Kashmir.
After the culmination of the three states’ Training Needs Assessment (Jammu, Manipur, Pondicherry), CSR hosted a One Day Expert Panel Consultation on 17th July 2017 in the New Delhi Headquarters. The objective of the Expert Panel Consultation was to share the state specific learning and to invite feedback on fine tuning the content of the upcoming Two Day Training on Gender Sensitive Best Practices, Implementation and Capacity Building of the Police Officials.
The Expert Panel Consultation was attended by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Indian Police Foundation, Special Police Unit for Women and Children (Delhi), Nanakpura Police Station representatives (Delhi), Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Criminal Investigation Department (Jammu and Kashmir). The feedback received in the One Day Expert Panel Consultation would be used to enhance the training module at the state level.
The training would seek to understand the problems faced or pre-empted by the police officials (communication and outreach given the legal complexities) and optimization of limited legal resources to sensitively handle survivors and their cases.
From the perspective of survivors, the training would undertake dialogue on non-reporting of crimes by the survivor or the survivor withdrawing legal statements in registered cases / crimes. Prima facie, there might be a possibility that the survivor and the victim find themselves lacking alternatives for better ways to acquire justice. This possibility not only has to be investigated but also rectified.
The police training shall give a theoretical sheen of gender constructs and a sociological approach to understanding the same. In order to do so, CSR and HSF felt it was imperative to undertake a Training Needs Assessment (TNA) that would fine tune the trainings as per individual states and their requirement. It was also facilitate taking on board local resource people who would table the discussion in the two day training for each of the states.
