The entire audience was silent after watching Sunitha Krishnan’s powerful TEDIndia talk on the issue of child sex trafficking in India in November this year.  People needed time to digest her message.

She spoke about the organisation Prajwala she began almost 15 years ago in Hyderabad, India, and its mission of helping trafficked children.  Prajwala finds, extracts, and supports women who are trafficked into prostitution as children. I visited her and Prajwala in Hyderabad after the conference to speak to her to understand more about it.

In conversation she displayed an intense, resolute determination, and selfless pride in the activities of the organisation.  She described a multipronged approach aimed at helping these children by providing equal parts psychological support, civic support, and vocational support. She made it clear that none of these approaches alone could achieve the desired outcome, which was full reintegration into their community.

Her organisation worked to table, and have civic compensation legislation for trafficked children passed through Andra Pradesh state parliament to enable their civic rehabilition.  This, she described, was crucial to having the children recognise themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, and crucially, have that same mindshift occur in the communities they were re-entering.

In addition, Prajwala has set up seventeen schools, educating the children through all stages of primary and secondary education.  I visited one of these schools and spoke to a few of the teenage girls, one of which was now in university completing a Bachelor of Commerce.

On the same grounds, they had vocational training workshops in metalwork and woodwork, and were running a printing enterprise. One of the most difficult aspects to deal with was the fact that approximately one out of three girls had contracted HIV prior to their arrival at Prajwala, and medical support was a significant challenge.

Sunitha has suffered both threatened and real physical abuse from the vested interests in child trafficking.  She has been attacked in fourteen separate incidents, and at the time of our meeting, was waiting for an operation required to fix her hearing, from a recent attempt on her life.

The consequences of Prajwala’s work is inspiring.  Over 3,500 children have received support, 600 of which have gone on to marry and have 46 children, who she affectionately described as her grandchildren.  This, by anyone’s standards, is a big achievement.

Watch her talk above to hear it in her own words.

Furniture made by the women at Prajwala

]]> http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/12/sunitha-krishnan-and-prajwala-fighting-for-trafficked-children/feed/ 1 http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/11/svym-primary-health-care-in-action/ http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/11/svym-primary-health-care-in-action/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:17:52 +0000 Pieter http://www.ppeach.com/blog/?p=446

On my way to TED India I was shown around the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement activities in Saragur, rural India, by an old friend who worked there as a paediatric surgeon. It was started 15 years ago by 4 medical students from Mysore and comprises two schools educating approximately 800 students between them, and a 100 bed hospital supplying free medical care to the local population.

Even though they were medically trained, they realised early that without education and nutrition they were fighting an uphill battle. The quality of the school was impressive, educating children from age of 2 through to highschool graduation, and boarding about 30% of their chidlren.  There were 30 computers in each school, and although one of the schools had access to the internet, as yet, the remotest of the two schools didn’t. I couldn’t help but think about the resources these kids now had access to through these computers that they used to have to rely on donated books for.

The founders were still working there fulltime as doctors/administrators.

With social media gaining traction since SARS (2003) and Avian H5N1 (2006), it will be interesting to see what role it might now play as a media tool in the current pandemic du jour.  The benefits of social media are clear, namely speed of communication, and monitoring sentiment.  The cost in accuracy is not insignficant, and it will be simply a matter of how to best use it.  Can new micro media services like twitter add anything useful? Will good information float well enough above the bad to make it worthwhile keeping track of?

I don’t think the question is whether people should, its a question of how they should. Twitter is just an open conversation tool, and people will use it to talk about issues important to them, and if swineflu/H1N1 does take hold, it will become one of those issues.

Access and distribute reliable information. Thankfully, several streams of information are available from official government and international agencies. (WHO -website & twitter CDC – Website, Twitter, Email).  The higher the official signal to unofficial noise, the better.  You could argue that it is often slower and more deliberate than other sources, but they have significant cost/benefit analyses to make with each official release.  Partially uncertain information is occasionally communicated, but only after due consideration.

Focus on facts and confirmed cases. Real numbers are much less than that reported in the media. If somebody publishes something without a link to either official or reliable press (eg. AFP) sources and you’re still interested, try looking for a pattern of multiple first hand accounts rather than a chain of retweets. Specifically with the current H1N1 Swineflu outbreak, “suspected” cases can be very misleading.  Once an “area” (eg. often a city) has a single laboratory confirmed case, everybody who presents to the emergency department, or general practitioner, with at least two of 1) runny nose or nasal congestion, 2) sore throat, 3) cough, 4) fever or feverishness gets labelled as a “suspected case”. This is all in the CDC case definition here.  You can imagine the number of patients with otherwise innocuous colds that come through like this everyday, let alone when the population is on heightened alert.

The next bit of information of interest to most people will be a change in the global pandemic alert phase which can be found here. For Australians, the federal government has a website up at http://www.flupandemic.gov.au/ with some information on pandemic preparedness with links to each state health departments. Its not the best, but at least its something local for both clinicians and the public.

The best source of CONFIRMED US cases are to be found here http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

Below is an unofficial map from http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/ of human cases of H1N1 infection.

Know of any good, reliable sources of information people might find useful?