How Prevention Stops Exploitation

In Cambodia, families facing extreme poverty and desperate circumstances are at high risk of being trafficked. If they are dealing with debt or illness, the risk is even greater. And that’s why we’re taking decisive action through four prevention projects. 

 From providing prevention training to safe job options, your support allows us to stop slavery before it starts. We are also raising awareness using creative methods, and exploring ways to connect with children and youth to protect them from online sexual exploitation.

Through our Trafficking Vulnerability Prevention Project, families at high risk of being trafficked receive jobs-skills training to start their own small businesses and help them stay safe. Our Canadian directors visited this project in February, and want to share firsthand how your generosity is creating real change:

“I made my way across the red dirt path and stepped onto the hard tile of the hair salon. We had travelled several hours out of Phnom Penh, to a rural community in Kampong Cham Province.

As I looked up to meet the client I was struck. She was a young girl, sixteen years old, about the age of my own daughter. She smiled timidly as we greeted each other and we sat down to hear her story. 

When Ratanak came to the village, Kantha had already been working for four years at a banana plantation. It was hard, physical labour and her brother worried about her. I pictured what it would have been like for my own daughter to be out there alone in the grueling sun. Oh, how a trafficker’s promise of better work would have been tempting! 

Thankfully, Ratanak identified Kantha’s family as a candidate for the project before traffickers could lure her. With the encouragement of her mother and brother, and after receiving career counselling, Kantha began to train as a hair stylist and esthetician. She dreams of being hired for weddings and special events and eventually she wants to open her own salon.  

As Kantha spoke my mind flashed back to my own three daughters in Canada. Her sweet smile and cautious eyes were a reminder of just how vulnerable young girls are and how her life would look radically different if she had been trafficked. But instead, Kantha is learning skills and gaining confidence that give her hope for a future living in freedom.” 

– Shanna Keen, Development Director 

You can read the rest of our E-newsletter at: www.ratanak.org/news

*Names, images and or/some details have been altered as appropriate to protect the identities of those in our care.