Crocus 2011.

Crocus 2011 is here! Saffron Tree's annual festival of books is about to begin! ST is turning five and the theme this year is the FIVE ELEMENTS. Click here for Sandhya's beautiful introductory post and keep checking the web site for more. Reviews, art & crafts, interviews, competitions,... they got it all!

Violence Against Women Awareness Month.

Similar to the CSA Awareness Month, October is going to be Violence Against Women Awareness Month.

Heres what the core team has to say about it:

We know the subject is very wide and includes multiple aspects. To ensure that this awareness campaign is

effective, we have limited our scope to the following aspects:

1. Domestic violence – physical violence by husband/partner, other family members etc
2. Violence against girl child – including deprivation
3. Sexual violence – including marital rape, date rape
4. Emotional/psychological abuse
5. Dowry-related violence – including bride burning
6. Female infanticide
7. Acid attacks

We invite you to support and strengthen VAWM Oct 2011 as only you can. You can...

Keep up with our blog.

Write about it and send your blog post links or writeups to vawawareness at gmail dot com

(confidentiality and anonymity respected, as always).

Tweet about it – don't forget to add http://twitter.com/#!/VAWMonth .

Join in the Facebook discussions.

Show your support with the badge.

It's the season that celebrates the power of women. Come join in our Stree Shakti special posts.

Twitter Chat on Child Sexual Abuse.

Anuja Gupta founder of RAHI Foundation is going to a twitter chat on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse on 5th April between 4:30 pm and 5:30 pm.

We will be tweeting with a hashtag of #CSAAM, please login in to twitter at that time for the informative. The chat will be Q&A based and if u have any questions you want her to answer please leave them in the comments or tweet them to us at @CSAAwareness with a hashtag of #CSAAM

A little about RAHI and Anuja

About RAHI –

The RAHI Foundation is a support centre, based in New Delhi, India. It is the only centre of its kind in the country that specializes in working with adult women survivors of incest and childhood sexual abuse and offers services that are uniquely important to their recovery process. The centre is dedicated to providing individual and group services for survivors aimed at their psychological, emotional, sexual and spiritual recovery.

The Foundation was established in August 1996 on the basis of the prestigious Fellowship for Population Innovations of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation received by Anuja Gupta, Director of RAHI.

Website – http://www.rahifoundation.org/home.html

About Anuja Gupta

Anuja Gupta is the Founder & Executive Director at RAHI Foundation, a centre for the prevention and healing of incest/child sexual abuse.

Anuja and her work at RAHI

Anuja started RAHI (Recovering and Healing from Incest) Foundation in 1996. RAHI is a support centre for adult women survivors of incest and child sexual abuse (CSA) and an education, advocacy, training, research and communication in the field.

RAHI is the only organization of its kind in India.

In Anuja’s words – “I am an incest/CSA educator, trainer and counselor. I do individual and group therapy with adult women survivors and their supporters, and with non-abusive family members of child victims. My therapeutic approach is a blend of feminist counseling, narrative therapy, cognitive behavior therapy and psychodrama.
I conduct training with mental health professionals, students and social workers and lecture and present extensively on the subject at universities, schools, conferences, NGOs and other forums in the country and abroad. I help start and mentor other organizations and support groups working on child sexual abuse in the country.”

Cross posted from the CSAAM website.

Are you an adult who survived Child Sexual Abuse?

We all carry our own demons. Memories we have buried in our subconscious which we wish never to confront again. But maybe writing about our experiences would provide a much needed catharsis. We, at CSAAM April 2011 invite you to tell us YOUR story. Anonymous stories are welcome. We want to know what happened, how it affected you as a child, as an adult. We want to know how you dealt with the pain. Email us your stories at csa.awareness.april@gmail.com. Talk about it. Don’t bury your experiences.

- The CSAA Team.

ps.
You can also send your story as a comment here if that will be easier. And I will post it in the csaawarenessmonth blog.

Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Month - April 2011.

All through April, there is going to be a lot of discussion, posts, expert opinions, helpful information, point to ponder, statistics, dos and donts about Child Sexual Abuse Awareness across many blogs. If its one blog you should nt miss reading, it is this - http://csaawarenessmonth.wordpress.com/

The blogathon begins on April 1st.

Please support the initiative. Here's how.


If you would like to add to the discussion or know somebody else who would, please note that entries are welcome.

a. mailed to csa.awareness.april@gmail.com OR
b. posted as FB notes and linked to Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Month Page OR
c. posted on your own blog with the logo and linked to the main blog OR
d. linked or posted on Twitter tagged twitter.com/CSAAwareness OR
e. sent via some/all of the above methods

If you are wondering what to write about, the list of topics is available here. Or you can choose your own topic related to CSA. Anonymous contributions are accepted and requests for anonymity will of course be honored. Bloggers can publish guest posts too.

Please remember to send in a mail with all necessary links or just your input to csa.awareness.april@gmail.com

Hats off to Kiran and Monika who have been working hard round the clock to put everything together.

The Fungle.

This is a fun website for kids. Ashu and I explored the beta version of The Fungle together a couple of days back and as expected, the kid is hooked. As a beginner reader, Ashu was nt able to read everything on her own and needed my help to navigate in the beginning. Then I left her alone with it and came back 10 minutes later to see her dressing up her avatar, listening to a story and then playing a game! But being the scaredy cat that she is, she asked me to help because she was afraid of the snake that appeared in the game! Its nice that the stories and books are read alongs since she can listen to them. And I like the fact that theres an option of switching off the read along for kids who can read.

And like I wrote to Narayanan, the CEO, the Bee Mail idea is pure genius. Ashu went to bed asking if she got a bee mail! :) We cant wait for the Fungle to go live.

Please check it out if you are interested.

Heres Utbt's review of The Fungle and a short interview with the CEO.

Cross posted at http://boosbabytalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/fungle.html