Thiruvananthapuram: Our Responsibility to Children (ORC), which aims to address deviant behaviour among youth and adolescents and now being implemented in four districts, will be dovetailed with the central scheme, Integrated Child Protection Services (ICPS). All this while it was conducted by the Police Department in association with the Education Department, in Kozhikkode, Thrissur, Ernakulam and Thiruvananthapuram. Once it becomes part of ICPS under the Social Justice Department, ORC will be extended to the entire state.
Within ICPS, the objective of ORC is to create a safe, nurturing, and just environment where vulnerable children involved, or at risk of getting involved, in destructive behaviour are brought to the mainstream equipped and empowered with life skills and appropriate support. The framework for service provision under the ICPS would include: discovery and appreciation of what is working well in each school and community, helping the community to visualize how they would like to improve the school; and communities of volunteers helping them to develop and deliver specific projects to materialize their dreams.
ORC is now being subsumed into ICPS because of the commonality of objectives. “Within the ICPS framework, ORC will focus on identification and management of children at risk through appropriate interventions. ORC will achieve its objectives through enabling existing protection and service agencies (including non-governmental organisations) as well as strengthening the community role in the protection and safeguarding of children’s interests,” a top Social Justice Department official said.
The Department has now come out with an operation manual which will be tested during the pilot phase when the ORC program will be implemented in 10 schools each in 4 pilot ORC districts (Ernakulum, Kozhikode, Thrissur, and Trivandrum) and 5 schools each in the remaining 10 districts. In addition, it will also target child care institutions run by the Department of Social Justice.
