 Why a Safe House?
The dialogue that we keep with the guardians of the children has taught us a whole lot of things. We have to put a lot of trust in our gut feeling, as each family situation is different from another. The common ground between the families is the misery, the chronic diseases and a very short-sighed view on things, as they live from day to day, worrying about their sheer survival.
 During 2006, we came in contact with six children who we were convinced run a great danger should they stay in the environment where they were. Three of these six children are now in Thailand. Facing this kind of situation, we know in advance that our work to change mentalities and to get the children to school will not make much of a difference.
 It is clearly insufficient to protect the child.
Between us, in the NGO, we call these children “trafficking risk level 1”. Young daughters to a mother who is a prostitute in Thailand run an extremely high risk of joining their mother once they are old enough to work, which is around 11 years old. These girls are looked after by the grand-mother, who has often worked in the sex industry herself. In this kind of situation, no Western-minded persuasion, information or appeal to her feelings will do. It is necessary to eat and to survive, and once the moment has come, it has come. The mothers return to the village only to give birth, and afterwards, they go back to their working place alone, leaving yet another child with the grand-mother. Sometimes, the children are born from an unprotected relation with a client, and therefore, it is not rare that they are infected with HIV already from birth.
 Our work is very difficult and very delicate. Normally, we have managed to send the child to school and we have created a trustful relationship with the guardian, and everything seems to go well, but it does not. We have only started, in cases of trafficking risk level 1.
There is especially one case, a small girl whom we need to take out of the environment where she lives. It can be done with the good will of the guardian, but it needs to be done before the irreversible happens and she “disappears” (often these children disappear during the school holidays). In order to do this, we take advantage of the short term vision that the guardian holds, but again, we only intend to take children from their home environment in cases where it is absolutely necessary, since for children who are trafficking risk level 2 or 3, our prevention work yield very good results. However, for the worst of the trafficking risk level 1 cases, we need an alternative, and the safe house is this alternative.
In the 800 children that we follow, the worst of the trafficking risk level 1 cases are about 50, and a few of them are boys.
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