From The Hindu, 2 May 2007

Gender sensitisation becomes a part of police training

Alladi Jayasri

# Gender Sensitisation and People-friendly Police project was launched in 2001
# It teaches policemen to deal with cases relating to violence against women and children

BANGALORE: Flushed with the success of the Gender Sensitisation and People-friendly Police (GSPP) project launched in partnership with UNICEF, the Karnataka State Police is now making plans to include it in the curriculum for new recruits who will be trained in the State’s six police training schools.

Additional Director-General of Police (Recruitment and Training) D.V. Guruprasad, who is the nodal officer for the project, said that up to December 2006, over 2,800 police personnel had been trained in workshops, including 327 probationary sub-inspectors, and 754 probationary constables. The State has approximately 75,000 police personnel and 809 police stations. All police stations in Bangalore city now have at least one trained person to handle and deal with cases relating to violence against women and children, Mr. Guruprasad told The Hindu .

Begun modestly in 2001, the GSPP project developed a training module focussing on violence against women and children with the help of over 500 personnel, from the Director-General and Inspector-General to police constables in remote police stations. It was supported by resource persons and women’s and children’s organisations across the State. In 2003, the in-service training process began and, in 2005, the project was expanded to cover police training schools and academies.

UNICEF to withdraw

Soon UNICEF will remove itself from the project, and the Police Department is preparing to make the training programme a permanent feature.

“In the next five years, we would have achieved 100 per cent sensitisation,” Mr. Guruprasad said.

With Raichur district having the highest incidence of trafficking in women and children, the three police subdivisions of Raichur, Sindhanur and Lingasugur are going to be special focus areas.

A long haul

But it is a long haul, and Donna Fernandes of the women’s group Vimochana, who conducts some of the workshops and monitors the project, said, “It is disturbing to see that many of the police personnel do not regard domestic violence as a crime. Though many of them say they benefited from the workshops, there is still a tendency to avoid registering a complaint or to register all complaints as dowry-related ones.”

Jija Hari Singh, the State’s first woman Director-General of Police, Fire Forces, said gender-sensitisation had been addressed at various times in the past 15 years. “I have given talks and attended workshops, but I find there is not much impact. But this project (GSPP) could work, over time.”

Explaining how the module was created, Mr Guruprasad said a study was carried out in ten police stations in Bangalore over 18 months. The key findings were: very few cases related to women and children were actually registered; `counselling’ was often seen as a substitute for registration; the prevalent attitude of most officers was to minimise the incidence of violence and to deny the right of the complainant to seek justice; while many police personnel were more sympathetic towards children’s issues, their responses to women were traditional and patriarchal; violence against women and children was not seen as part of the `mainstream’ activities of the local police station, but were often referred to the women’s police station; the limited powers of the women police stations as well as the abdication of responsibility by the system overall led to further injustice to complainants.