Sure. I don’t want to say too much because it’s not just me doing this and it’s been a huge team effort across schools and with citizen and resident volunteers over 10 years.
It started with linking social workers at private schools together (every school is supposed to have one on staff, in the way that you’d have a DSL or CPO in the U.K.) and providing them with training that we paid for. We needed Kuwaiti partners though. Lots of our work was finding people with relevant education who were able and motivated to participate.
Our network of schools and school leaders/owners as it stands is small, but growing. We also can’t be a singular charity or business because then the government wouldn’t entertain what we want. We wanted to just get everyone focused on the issues at hand. We set up an abuse reporting system that is used by about 50 schools now.
There are high rates of sexual harassment against women in public but we found a woman judge (Kuwait appointed several female justices this year for the first time ever, we need more, but it’s happening slowly) and an awesome feminist lawyer who were not willing to stand for this bullshit and drew up good guidance to help women access police services and protections while having appropriate advocates. There are dark spots that we don’t have influence in, but during normal times we regularly invited parents, stakeholders and teachers from other schools into our school to show them what we were doing and what child protection is at it’s root. It was at different times hilarious and darkly depressing but everything was worth it.
There’s a lot of young Kuwaiti people who have massive pride in their country and have been chiefly educated in the U.K./USA. That generation can be difficult to engage on some subjects but as soon as we had willing volunteers to go train and then take on what is a thankless awful, crushing job in schools, we knew we were most of the way there. The final piece to get things really rolling without us was to get an “untouchable” of sorts. We wanted a Kuwaiti woman from a lofty family background to back our work and help agitate at levels higher than we could reach. We found a real badass lesbian pirate (a story for another time, can’t out her) who had worked in education already and was a member of the royal family. She drives a lot of the moves at the top level now but COVID has slowed everything to a crawl. With everyone at home right now we’re focusing on talking more to class teachers in schools about how they handle welfare check ins on vulnerable children remotely.
We never really met with much resistance. Just apathy. That was probably the biggest thing to work through. Every new link in the chain saw us encounter people who had to be bludgeoned into doing the work and we usually left a trail of unemployed MoE staff and school workers in our wake. Sorry, not sorry. If you won’t do the work then you don’t deserve to be in the game!
The story you linked was a total joke, completely unacceptable and actually did more to help our cause than anything else. It was one of a number of government decisions following the death of the previous Emir and a December election which saw (I believe) a record high number of women coming forward as potential candidates but few making the ballot and none being elected. It seems now that, in light of the results of the election and the early cabinet appointments, there is appetite from the leadership to disband the two or three-week-old government and start all over again. I hope that they get it right this time.
