What Makes SSF Unique
While there are many NGO’s and other aid groups that focus on helping people who have been victimized by human trafficking and sexual exploitation, SSF is special in the fact that it seeks to identify children at high risk for being trafficked in the communities where they live, in order to prevent them from being exploited in the first place. To achieve this goal, SSF has created a standardized system that allows the organization to input data collected from initial assessments of the family’s history in order to determine the level of risk faced by each child considered for support.
Similar to the process used by insurance companies, factors such as family size, parent employment status, debt levels, literacy, gender, land ownership, the prevalence of alcoholism, drug use, and HIV within the family, and the family’s financial status are assigned different values according to their causal significance, using past data from trafficked children to determine their relative importance. Children who score above a certain level are then selected for aid.
Although SSF supports many children, both male and female, a special emphasis is pl
Moreover, SSF understands that it is nearly impossible to help the affected children without also helping their families. Although some victims are trafficked by strangers, a much higher percentage are trafficked by someone they know, a fact that illustrates that family and community members play a major role in either preventing or facilitating human trafficking. Furthermore, The Ministry of Social Affairs and Youth Rehabilitation found that nearly 47 percent of those who managed to return to Cambodia after being trafficked to Thailand stated that their mother facilitated their forced migration, usually in order to settle out of control debt or alleviate the extreme poverty of the entire family.
SSF also recognizes that the factors that contribute to human trafficking do not stop at the children’s immediate family – it is a community wide problem. As a result, SSF has increasingly become involved in projects such as well building that benefit entire villages, many of whom have no access to clean drinking water, forcing the families who live in them to spend up to 50 percent of their daily income in order to buy water from outside sources.
Ensuring access to quality education for children is a high priority, proving time and time again to be a highly effective mechanism for preventing children from becoming involved in commercial sexual exploitation. Although SSF does not run its own school, the organization provides the children with daily pocket money, bicycles for transportation, uniforms for school, and all the school materials they need in order to attend state schools, in addition to hiring tutors and conducting seminars in the compound to help supported children to succeed academically.
Although the primary goal of SSF is to prevent human trafficking, the organization has also committed itself to preventing all forms of violence, exploitation, abuse, and discrimination within the communities in which it works. In order to achieve these goals, SSF emphasizes the importance of responsibility.
Sadly, many parents who were themselves raised in difficult circumstances do not understand their role in improving the lives of their own children. Through its livelihood program, which works in conjunction with its child protection program, SSF has sought to provide opportunities to the poorest families to begin earning money using the skills they already posses, or teaching them new skills they can use. By providing start up capital for them to open small businesses, the poorest families are given a chance to double or triple their daily incomes, with showing them that they need to be responsible for help themselves, instead of relying on others who can and do exploit them and their children.
Because SSF recognizes the importance of family in improving the lives of supported children, the organization places emphasis on allowing them to live with their families, in their own communities. The majority of those that SSF supports live at home as opposed to placing them in institutionalized care where they are unable to assist their younger brothers and sisters. Moreover child adoption programs and the like displace the children from their communities and families that make up an important part of Cambodian life. However, there are some cases where SSF recognizes that living at home is detrimental to the development of the child, for instance in abusive situations. Additionally, some villages are so far from the nearest school that it would be nearly impossible for them to travel back and forth each day, especially when the route it dangerous for them to travel. If supported children live more than 6 km from their school, then the children are given a place to stay at the SSF compound, which is close enough to their homes that they can frequently visit their families.
The SSF Compound is more than just a shelter that provides a safe place to stay and food to eat, but also a place for learning. The greater goal of the Sao Sary Foundation is to teach the children skills that will allow them to succeed on their own once they grow up so that they will be better equipped to provide for their families. SSF understands that protecting them from harm is only a solution that will help them for the present. Social and financial education is of paramount importance, in order to ensure that they will be able to succeed throughout their lives.
SSF seeks to instill in them the idea that must be able to think for themselves and truly desire more than a life working hard for others that will barely allow them to earn enough money to survive. Without successful parental role models, the children that SSF supports have had few chances to learn simple life skills that many people take for granted, such as financial responsibility and the importance of learning. By teaching them basic vocational skills such as haircutting, cooking, and massage therapy, SSF hopes to provide them with a chance to develop long-term business strategies that are fostered through involvement, for instance, in the organization’s banana cake selling operation. SSF seeks to provide them with the skills they need to provide for themselves and their children in the future and become leaders in their community.
Everything that happens at the SSF compound is done in a way to support community involvement. Everyone involved with the organization, including the staff, is treated the same. Everyone lives and works together. Whereas Cambodian culture is based around a hierarchical structure that requires obedience to elders, SSF has worked to establish a supportive environment where everyone’s ideas can be heard. In fact, the children are encouraged to try to come up with ideas of their own, a characteristic is not often taught in Cambodia schools. The same ideas are promoted within the communities, because it is equally important to teaching adults about the benefits of listening to their children. Sadly, few people in Cambodia recognize the importance of giving back to their communities as interpersonal relationships often stop at the family level. While the children are taught about the importance of volunteer efforts and the ways they can work to solve the problems they see in society, SSF has also instituted mechanisms that provide for monthly community wide meetings. By pooling their ideas and their resources, SSF understands that the communities will be better positioned to respond to their own problems in the future.
Nonprofit organization works to help absolute poor families to care for their children, avoiding them from all forms of violence, exploitation, abuse against, including child sexual commercial, trafficking, child labor and child marriage.
