Sabitri Sanyal
I remember the soft afternoon sunlight filtering through the open door of the community hall, the smell of camphor and sandalwood incense in the air. We sat in a wide circle on woven mats with girls from the local community school, gentle dholak rhythms playing in the background. “Close your eyes,” I whispered, “and feel the music in your belly.” Slowly, they raised their arms, swaying with purpose. In that moment of guided movement, I saw young bodies relax – shoulders that carried months of silent worry finally drop. We weren’t just dancing; we were practicing a body-based pedagogy grounded in trust, letting each girl feel safe to explore her own space. Afterward, when we shared sketches of our feelings and names for different parts of our bodies, I smelled the sweet tang of hope.
In that circle session – part of a trauma-informed expressive arts workshop I led – I realized how far our official curriculum is from this reality. These girls rarely get permission to even name a feeling, let alone explore it through play or art. Outside this safe space, their schools teach nothing about consent or emotions; sex and body topics are whispered or avoided entirely. This gap is painfully common. Studies show that adolescent girls in urban slums face “intersecting structural and cultural barriers,” including early marriage and poor school facilities, which push them out of school early[1]. A recent survey found 7.9% of urban girls aged 15–19 are already pregnant or mothers[2] – a “silent emergency” of neglected sexual and reproductive health. In slum communities, the dearth of formal education means teens often rely on the Internet or rumors for information about sex and bodies. As one study bluntly notes, the “lack of comprehensive sex education” has hit slum youth especially hard, because they have no “legitimate resources” for learning about healthy relationships and consent[3][4].
Compounding this, years of government programs meant to teach life skills or sexual health have been weak or short-lived. For example, India’s national Adolescent Education Programme (life-skills education) was rolled out in thousands of schools but then scrapped in 2020[5]. Today’s School Health & Wellness Programme (under Ayushman Bharat) technically covers topics from mental health to gender equality[6], but on the ground it’s often delivered as one-hour checkboxes by untrained “health ambassadors.” As one NGO training program found, even teachers “are not able to answer” students’ questions about gender or sex[7]. The result? Schools remain silent spaces where curricula teach biology and hygiene, but ignore trauma, consent, and the emotional lives of children.
In our participatory action research with a West Bengal secondary school, we tried to change that dynamic. We approached the project as a feminist, decolonial, trauma-informed collaboration: students helped design the activities, and we kept checking our own biases. In practice this meant prioritizing movement, art, and storytelling. We drew on expressive arts and Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL) techniques that honor how feelings show up in the body. One exercise had girls map out “safe and unsafe zones” on their own stick-figure silhouettes, sharing what gestures or words in class felt comfortable. In every session, we emphasized informed consent– teaching them that even a hug or pat should only happen if both people agree. This was new for many; as they painted and whispered their discoveries, they began labeling parts and needs their textbooks never mentioned. We also built in self-compassion: we learnt about gentle grounding breaths and asked them to speak to themselves as kindly as they would to a friend. These acts of kindness toward their own bodies countered the harsh self-criticism so common in Indian girls. In fact, recent research with Delhi teens found older adolescent girls had higher levels of self-judgment and isolation than boys[8], and the authors concluded: “we must begin teaching self-compassion as a life skill, not a luxury”[9]. Our community circles aimed exactly at that – planting seeds of inner kindness.
Above all, we built safe emotional spaces. We learned from education research that schools need to help children feel “seen, not judged”[10]. In practice, this looked like giving girls permission to cry, to pause a music game when upset, and to speak without fear of punishment. We worked with community educators, too: one became skilled at noticing patterns (“a quiet child may not just be shy; they could be overwhelmed”[10]) and would gently check in rather than dismiss a student as lazy. Our approach mirrors calls to make schools trauma-informed: as one expert puts it, a trauma-informed system “endeavours to respond to the adversities children face, and to shape whole-school policies and pedagogies around a deeply contextualized understanding of child well-being”[11]. We strive to help each learner feel “safe, seen, and heard”[11] – a stark contrast to the usual message that girls must be silent and tough.
These interventions produced real insights. The girls told us they wanted more time to talk in class, to ask questions like “What is consent?” and “Why do we bleed?” without giggling shame. They said they felt lighter when allowed to express fear or joy openly. Community educators admitted they felt relieved after training sessions – one confessed it was her first time discussing periods outside of biology chapter. Parents, when involved, shared relief at seeing their daughters come home smiling instead of carrying stress. Of course, not everything was easy. Some parents still insisted these topics be taught delicately, fearing it might “encourage” improper behavior. Community educators sometimes worried about the community’s comfort. Through it all, however, a common theme emerged: everyone recognized that simply lecturing about puberty or discipline was not enough. As a Jagori program in Himachal Pradesh found, when adolescents learn only from porn or myths, “Complete absence of … comprehensive sexual health education in Indian schools is one of the biggest reasons for the prevailing taboo.”[4] The need to normalize open conversation – to practice body literacy – was clear. As one of our partner NGOs emphasizes, “conducting school sessions on body literacy, gender and sexual health…is very critical for adolescents”[12].
And yet, policy remains stuck. On paper, India has made promises: the National Education Policy 2020 explicitly includes SEL to create “good human beings … possessing compassion and empathy”[13]. Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK, the National Adolescent Health Programme) officially covers life skills and peer education. The School Health & Wellness Programme now lists 11 health themes – even “gender equality” and “mental health”[6]. NCERT has even produced a guide for comprehensive sexuality education[14]. But in practice these programs often miss the mark. They assume one-size-fits-all solutions and focus on biomedical content. As one analysis warns, SEL “cannot bring change in isolation” when children live amid caste, class, and gender oppression[15]. Indeed, our experience shows deep inequities get ignored. For example, menstrual health initiatives under these programs typically treat “adolescent girls and women” as a uniform category[16]. Transgender youth, Dalit teens, children with disabilities – their needs vanish. As Tibrewala argues, schemes that do not consider caste or gender identity end up leaving many menstruators behind[17]. Our slum girls know this: one child quietly noted that nobody at school addressed her fears of being shamed during her period. Neither RKSK nor SHWP ask whose experiences are missing from the narrative. In effect, the policies rarely accommodate trauma or the embodied knowledge that these girls carry in their bodies.
A Call to Action: It’s time we put our bodies and voices at the center of education reform. Our work in Kolkata’s community learning space tells me that effective change will come only when policy listens to community truths. We need inclusive, body-literate, trauma-informed socio-emotional learning and comprehensive sexuality education in India’s schools. Concretely, this means training all teachers (and curricula) in consent, self-compassion, and cultural sensitivity; creating flexible class environments where students can move and breathe; and embedding intersectional content that acknowledges caste, gender, and lived realities[15][17]. It means reframing “health education” to include empowerment: teaching girls they have a right to control their bodies and choices, not just avoid disease. It means government programs like RKSK and the School Health & Wellness Programme should mandate participatory, arts-based SEL activities, not just quizzes. If the New Education Policy’s vision is to “develop good human beings”[13], let us redefine that to include girls who are confident in their bodies, gentle with themselves, and prepared to ask for what they need.
Change is urgent. As one girl whispered after a circle session, “I didn’t even know I could feel this safe.” By listening and learning in these circles, we saw that children heal through movement and sharing, not through hurried lectures. India’s public school system must now scale up such practices: we must mainstream trauma-informed education that is rooted in body-based pedagogy and empathy. Only then can every child in every community, slum, suburb, and city school grow up truly seen – mind and body – and become the resilient, compassionate young leaders we hope for.
Sources: Evidence for these reflections comes from a range of studies and reports, including research on SEL and caste in India[15], analyses of sex-ed gaps in slum settings[3][1], evaluations of school health programs[6][16], and recent surveys of adolescent well-being[8][2], among others. These findings have been woven into our narrative of lived experience and community insight to advocate for a more inclusive, informed approach to education for all children.
· [1] [2] Bridging Urban Inequality: An Integrated Framework for Education, Skill Development, and Health Access in India’s Slum Communities
· https://www.bnskbharat.org/post/bridging-urban-inequality-an-integrated-framework-for-education-skill-development-and-health-acce [3] ijpsl.in
· https://ijpsl.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Sex-Education_Shivangi-Surbhi.pdf
· [4] [7] [12] Introducing Sexual & Reproductive Health Education in Schools – AIF
· https://aif.org/introducing-sexual-reproductive-health-education-in-schools/
· [5] [6] [14] India | Comprehensive Sexuality Education | Education Profiles
· https://education-profiles.org/central-and-southern-asia/india/~comprehensive-sexuality-education
· [8] [9] Teens deserve a kinder inner voice: Unfolding research from India
· https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-10-teens-kinder-voice-unfolding-india.html
· [10] Creating safe spaces: How schools can support mental health from the start – Times of India
· [11] ‘My Teachers Didn’t Notice’: Nurturing the Well-being of Internally Displaced Children through Trauma-informed Education – The Education and Development Forum (UKFIET)
· [13] [15] Social-emotional learning (SEL) in India needs an intersectional lens | IDR
· [16] [17] Transgender persons and structural intersectionality: Towards menstrual justice for all menstruators in India
About the Contributor: Sabitri is a West Bengal-based social worker, mental-health practitioner and social researcher. She facilitates movement and expressive-arts community circles to advance trauma-informed socio-emotional learning and comprehensive sexuality education in community learning spaces. She partners with NGOs and CSR programs on qualitative studies, centering informed consent, body literacy, self-compassion, and equity-focused policy advocacy.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
Acknowledgement: This article was posted by Aashvee Prisha, a research intern at IMPRI.
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