Prevention

Preventing Children from Being Sold

In countries around the world today it has become culturally acceptable for families to sell their children when ends don’t meet. Child sex slavery has sadly become a massive industry in which 1.2 million children are being sold globally each year. Due to the high death rate in the sex trade (3 years or less), there is an increasing demand for more and more child workers.

Remember Nhu is a movement of people who dream of a better world. We believe that children have an inalienable right to grow up happy and healthy, and the idea that any child should be victimized in this way is appalling to all of us. Consider the following question: If you had the opportunity to identify a child who is at risk of being sold, prevent that from happening, and protect the child from ever entering the sex trade—would you do it?

That is exactly why Remember Nhu exists. We are a non-profit committed to ending child sex slavery through prevention. We identify those children who are at risk of falling prey to the sex trade and provide them with a home in which their physical, educational, emotional and spiritual needs are met. By creating a supportive environment for each of these children, we are ensuring a childhood free from sex slavery and also dramatically lowering their risk of joining the sex trade later in life.

This movement is fueled by people like you who are willing to generously donate in the form of monthly sponsorships so that children can grow up in the safety of Remember Nhu’s care. And thanks to people like you, we currently have 115 homes in 19 countries, where over 1,500 children are currently protected from being sold. To date, and including past graduates, we have prevented over 2,470 children from sex slavery.

Additionally, the statistics on Intervention are extremely sobering. Organizations committed to intervention methods have reported an average recidivism rate of anywhere from 70-90% in developing countries within two years of removing a child from the sex trade. In other words, most children who are removed from the sex trade tragically end up re-entering the sex trade within two years, for various reasons.

Something must be done for children in the sex trade and we commend the efforts of Intervention organizations. These organizations do hard work and good things for individual children—however, without proper and strategic legal, legislative, and/or law enforcement efforts at the government level to permanently shut down the operation in which the child was exploited, the demand and supply of the sex trade remain virtually unaffected by intervention work, and the horrors of the sex trade continue.

Consider instead a very different approach to saving children from the sex trade, that of Prevention:

When we place at-risk children in a Remember Nhu home, each child grows up to be the happy, healthy young adults that God intended them to be and are spared from ever experiencing the sex trade. For the children we serve who are not orphaned, families are allowed to visit with their children and continue a relationship with the child.

However, when we remove at-risk children from their vulnerable situation and place them in a prevention home, we are not just preventing each individual child from experiencing sex slavery. Prevention also causes a significant ripple effect in the global child sex trade market, in the following ways.

The existence of evil people in the world means that the “demand” for the sex trade will tragically continue. But there is something that can be done about the “supply” of the sex trade. When we identify and remove at-risk children from a village in which the sex brokers may do business, we eventually remove the supply of the child sex trade from that entire village—sometimes an entire region. Eventually the sex brokers must leave because there is no longer a “supply” of available children to buy in that village. In fact, we can already name dozens of villages where no child has been sold since we started Remember Nhu. Therefore we are ending child sex slavery one child at a time, one family at a time, and one village at a time.

To date, Prevention has become the most effective way to end child sex slavery because it diminishes the supply of global child trafficking, making it more and more difficult for sex brokers to find children to sell. Remember Nhu’s vision is to continue identifying and preventing at-risk children from being sold around the world until one day, eventually, we can live in a world where the global child sex trade can no longer function.

What is the most important part of the Prevention model? Heroic and generous people like you who are willing to sponsor an at-risk child to live in a Remember Nhu home and grow up safe from the sex trade. When you sponsor a child, you not only change that child’s life forever by protecting them from the sex trade, but you also remove that child permanently from the supply of the global sex trade and are a part of ending this horrible global crisis.

Would you please consider sponsoring a child or helping us in some way?