Vulnerable People

Who according to SSF’s Programme are the vulnerable people?

SSF uses the word vulnerable people are the persons who are poorest of the poor, property less, have small land and cannot do any thing with it-except the house building, the widows with many children, old with no descendants and relatives, disabled, no sociable ( who live in remote area), returned refugees, disabled families, orphans and vagabonds.

Who are according to SSF's Programme as the children at-high risk for being trafficked?

While there are many NGO’s and other aid groups 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 placed on protecting girls older than ten years old, as statistics show that they represent the highest risk of being trafficked, primarily for sexual exploitation. Moreover, girls are the most likely to be deprived of the chance to attend school as Cambodian society largely considers the education of women, who traditionally remain home and do not work, unimportant. Currently, SSF has identified far more children at high-risk for potential trafficking then they can support due to the financial constraint and the high percentage of families living in extreme poverty (defined as a family income of less than fifty cents per day), in Kampong Speu, one of Cambodia’s three poorest provinces.

SSF uses various ways to idenfity the vulnerable people through verbal reports from village development committees or communes, persons living round vulnerable family, village chiefs, our surveys for 2-3 times before starting the project, PRA (through interviews, information gathering from target groups) and commune database, and Village maps.

Also, SSF uses various tools developed by Identification of Poor Households Program (IDpoor) as reference as well. Read More...