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A small, deliberate cultural publisher

About Kaaval.

The name, the work, who is making it, and how to reach us.

Kaavalകാവൽ noun · Malayalam watch; guard; the keeping of vigil over something precious.

Kaaval is editorial work against the silence that hides child sexual abuse in India.

We publish essays, in English and in the languages we can reach. The films, the art, and the partner work will follow as the team and the work grow.

  • Kaaval is not a helpline.
  • Kaaval is not a service organisation.
  • Kaaval is not a campaign.

It is sustained editorial work, for the adult in a child's world.

Write to us
founders@kaaval.org

We respond within five working days. There is no phone line.

What we record

Privacy.

We measure whether the essays are read. Nothing more, and nothing that identifies you.

Kaaval uses Umami, a privacy-first analytics tool, with its data held in the European Union. It sets no cookies. It gives you no identifier, so you cannot be followed from one visit to the next or from this site to any other. It collects no name, no email address, and no IP address we can read. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, we record nothing about your visit at all.

What we do count: which pages are opened, how far into an essay a reader gets, whether a narration is played, and which link brought someone here. These are counts, not people.

We never record anything about the helpline resources on this site. No click, no page context, nothing. That is a safeguarding decision, and it is enforced in the code itself, not left to good intentions.

If you subscribe, your email address goes to Brevo, our email provider, and is used only to send you the essays. Unsubscribe with one tap in any email, and it is deleted. We do not sell, share, or trade it.

To ask what we hold about you, or to have it removed, write to founders@kaaval.org.

How this site is built

Accessibility.

A reader who needs this work most may be reading it on a borrowed phone, in a hurry, or with a screen reader. We build for that reader first.

We hold this site to WCAG 2.1 Level AAA for text contrast. Body text sits at seven to one or better against its background, and the pairings are fixed in the design system rather than chosen page by page.

Everything works by keyboard. A skip link jumps past the navigation to the essay. The narration player can be played, paused and scrubbed with the arrow keys. Focus is always visible, never suppressed.

Every essay can be listened to as well as read, in a narrated version we check before publishing. Nothing plays on its own. Nothing moves on its own if your device asks for reduced motion. There are no pop-ups, no interstitials, and no autoplay anywhere on this site.

Essays that need one carry a content note before the first paragraph, so you can decide before you begin rather than partway through. The Exit button, and the Escape key, replace this tab with an ordinary page at once.

Every image carries a text alternative. That is not a policy we remember to follow; a missing one fails the build.

We have not had this site audited by an independent accessibility practitioner, and we will say so here when we have. Until then, if something on this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, tell us at founders@kaaval.org and we will fix it. Please say what you were trying to do and what got in the way. We respond within five working days.

If you or a child you know needs support
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