In this episode of The Women Inspire Aspire Podcast, I talk to Kanika Shharma about Child Safety.

Being introduced to child safety by phrases used by her son, Kanika Shharma became curious about the topic and did further research on it. That lead to she writing her book and eventually started working on child safety awareness creation on a broader scope.

In this podcast, she shares about how child sexual abuse rate is too high in India, how she researched about the wordings used about child sexual abuse, how she realized there were no books in India about the subject and all the books that were available were by western authors, how she wrote her book, and how she aligned with the terms of 'safe touch' and 'unsafe touch'.

As any important topic that needs awareness in a country with huge population like India, child safety also needs mass communication. We talked extensively about how, apart from her book, Kanika is making efforts to create awareness about child safety. We specifically talked about how to create awareness in the rural areas, the government schools, the anganwadis, etc. We also talked about how she plans to scale her work through strategies like social media. She believes that social media is a great medium to create awareness about this. She says whoever is taking this message forward need to believe in the cause and feel the passion for it, so that the message would have more impact.

She told us how the topic is a taboo, and parents are unwilling to talk about it to their children even though they are the best people to talk about it to the children. We also talked about the challenges in creating awareness in multiple local languages in India. She shared how it's important for keeping that communication channel open is very important, and having that trust established between the child and parents is so important, so that they can come and talk about anything that they want to talk to the parents.

She shared a few points for people who are planning to pursue a career in child safety.

As her hobbies and interests, she shared about reading books and contemporary dancing, and a specific societal issue that you should listen to the podcast to know about!

Sit back, Relax, and Listen In!

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