So this is the new Daughters of Cambodia blog!
We'll be posting regular updates here about the centre and everything that happens there.
For starters, here is a little bit of info about Daughters:
Daughters is a faith based NGO that provides comprehensive services to female victims of sexual exploitation of any age and nationality who are working in the sex-industry in Cambodia, empowering them with the courage, inner resources and external resources to make life-style changes for their own lives. Through Centre activities and programmes, Daughters’ provides services which enable victims of sexual exploitation to set themselves free from enslavement through employment opportunities, and a wide range of social and psychological services. These include:
• Fair Trade business schemes providing salaried jobs
• Medical clinic
• Therapeutic and counselling services
• Free day-care
• On-site residential housing (optional)
• A wide range of creative classes to build self-esteem and provide a creative and expressive outlet for healing and fun. These include hip-hop dance, photography classes, art & design classes, Khmer dance, music classes, jewellery making, and others.
• Weekly educational workshops on important life skills topics, including domestic violence prevention, relationship/conflict resolution, drug addiction education, parenting skills, budgeting, team-building skills, self-esteem, and many more.
• Weekly church program to which girls are invited if they wish to learn about Christianity. Many girls have become Christians and are being discipled. The church program includes Biblical teaching, worship and prayer ministry.
Daughters started these services after conducting needs assessments with girls in brothels and finding that most girls wanted to live free from sexual exploitation but they were constrained by the need to earn an income constantly, because their families demanded on-going financial support. Daughters therefore designed a programme in which girls would be offered a job and immediately receive a salary, have freedom to choose where they want to live, receive therapeutic treatment, nurture, social support and educational services to enable holistic recovery, teach healthy decision-making and ensure changes are sustained long-term.
Daughters is a new approach to eradicating enslavement in sexual exploitation in Cambodia, avoiding the trauma and unsustained outcomes of forced rescues; victims who are reintegrated following forcible rescues (even when given skills and education) are mostly re-trafficked for 2 reasons: 1. the changes were imposed rather than internal and voluntary and 2. because families demand an immediate source of income. Outcomes from Daughters model to date show that the growing number of girls who leave the sex industry to start a new life through Daughters schemes 1. experience healing and freedom from trauma, and 2. sustain healthy choices because the life-style changes are internal, voluntary and holistic.
Girls who leave the sex industry prefer to live in their own homes rather than a shelter, and most of Daughters clients live in the community around the Centre within their existing support networks; however Daughters also provides on-site housing for younger girls who need more safety and nurture. Daughters approach to housing is one in which girls take responsibility for their own lives, they buy their own food and household supplies from their salaries and have to clean their home. This teaches them independent living, responsibility and life-skills rather than NGO dependence.
