To train its officials regarding how to react to gender-based complaints, Mumbai Police has come up with an innovative idea. Now, games, training sessions will help Mumbai Police officials to deal with gender-based complaints.
According to Indian Express, this training was conducted at the DB Marg police station hall in south Mumbai in which 25 policemen took part. During the session, the policemen played a game, which will tell them how confident those from the most marginalised groups in society are about going into a police station to make a complaint. It is a game developed by the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action or SNEHA, an NGO that has been in the process of carrying out 75 training sessions with the over 90 police stations across Mumbai since September last year to sensitise police about dealing with crimes against women and children.
In the game, each cop draws a chit from a box, assigning a role — of a transgender, an uneducated woman, a rich urban male. Then, each cop faces different crisis, and has to go to the police. The cop takes a step forward every time the person feels confident about approaching the police. He stands still each time the person does not feel confident about going to a police station.
“The point of this game or even the sessions we carry out for the cops is to make them realise on their own how the system is skewed against a certain section of the society. Once they reach that point on their own, it will make them more sensitive to particular groups of people like transgenders, who have a difficult time getting a complaint registered,” Dr Nayreen Daruwala, programme director at SNEHA told the Indian Express.
