Transitional Living
This project is developed in partnership with Daughters of Cambodia and seeks to bring healing, holistic restoration, and hope to lives of sexually exploited girls who are currently sex-workers by providing a platform for transition out of the brothels into normal community life.
We offer them opportunities for life-style changes, through a range of activities, and services designed to empower the girls with the courage to step out of the abusive circumstances and people they have, tragically, become bonded and enslaved to. Then we provide the resources to assist them in making sustained healthy choices for their lives. Our desire is that we would assist in building self-worth and dignity into their lives, by showing respect and care for them and through meeting their needs in practical, medical, emotional/psychological and spiritual ways. In so doing we seek to demonstrate the freedom available in Christian love. In all aspects of this program we seek to introduce components of beauty, dignity and self worth to girls who have never confronted any of these.
The Transition Life Skills program reaches victims of trafficking, who are still in the sex-industry, and is aimed at providing help and opportunity to leave the brothels. A drop-in day centre opened its doors January 1st 2007 in Stung Mean Chey, close to where many sex workers live and work. It is a safe-haven for the girls to receive medical treatment, therapeutic help and other services to meet various needs, to build self-esteem through loving nurture, to provide choices for alternative lifestyles, and to have the love of God ministered into their lives. Several innovative small business schemes have been started, providing employment with on-the-job training, since the chief maintaining factor disabling girls from leaving the sex-industry is the need to earn a wage to support family.
Since starting these businesses in mid-2007, and the addition of the program’s own retail store in Phnom Penh, supported by Ratanak International (UK), girls have been leaving the brothels to join us full-time in steady numbers. Since January 2008, around 3 girls a week were joining and currently in 2010 there are around 70 clients at the day centre on any given work day. Residential accommodation is also provided for girls who leave the brothel; most sex workers are reluctant to live in a shelter due to loss of freedom so we have established community-based accommodation for them.
Girls wishing to leave the sex industry may join a small business, receive training and are given a salary from the day they join. These small businesses currently include hand-sewn products and hand-crafted jewellery which are exported internationally as fair trade items. Silk screen printed products are also being created and marketed. The girls are learning baking/cooking skills and spa skills. Both the products created and cooking/spa skills are being utilised in the new shop which opened in 2010. The shop provides job opportunities for clients as well as a place to showcase their products which were previously only exported for sale. The shop also houses an exhibition centre that is the first of its kind, sharing with tourists and locals about the realities of sex trafficking in Cambodia.
The clients run a women’s spa located on the retail level and a cafe on the top floor. Ratanak International (UK) has been involved in the start up of the shop, spa, and exhibition centre with hopes that it will provide a means for sustainable income for this project and the girls being employed.
The Beneficiaries
This project focuses on girls who are current sex workers. Age range is 12 up to 30. Typically they are uneducated and come from poor and dysfunctional families who live off their earnings, and who have usually been instrumental in selling the girls in the first place. Sex workers are the most outcast sector of society in Cambodia, and have huge stigma in the local community; they have little chance of getting married or finding another job and changing their lives. They are generally despised.
All of these girls come after having heard from their peers about what we can offer. At first, girls come to the drop in centre where they are exposed to a normalized social environment, where they are shown respect and encouragement. Initially, drop in workshops focus on hairdressing and makeup application. It is in this fun environment, while getting their nails or hair done, that they start to build trust that will eventually give them the courage to leave the life of oppression and abuse that they have grown accustomed to. The drop-in centre also provides a program for very young children who live in the brothels, usually children of the sex workers or other children who are being raised by brothel owners. The children are aged between 18 months and 12 years and do not attend school. The program is aimed at intervening in the futures of these children by enabling them to achieve a different outcome for their lives through educational opportunities and psychological empowerment.