ACWP founded SCIC program after discovering a small village in Cambodia that was formed by a group of poor Vietnamese immigrants whose families migrate to Cambodia in search for work. For some desperate families, parents resulted to selling their children to brothels.

ACWP aims to help children who may be lured into sex trafficking. As a result, ACWP has developed various programs to provide immediate solution and long-term commitment to preventing children from being a victim of human trafficking crime; i.e., ranges from providing education, or vocational training and financial assistance.

By employing "Preventive Solutions" with a philosophy of not being limited to just giving money or scholarships, but also committing to guiding each child through various phases of their young life and giving them a glimmer of hope for a better future.

Status
In recent years, child trafficking in Southeast Asia has emerged as a globally recognized phenomenon and a major concern to many human rights advocates. The number of young girls being sold to brothels in Cambodia and trafficked from Viet Nam has increased significantly during this period. Several factors have combined to produce the effects of such atrocious crimes in this area including: high rates of unemployment, low incomes for working families, lack of education and job training, and legislation.

Added to these factors is the lack of enforcement by the local jurisdiction for children protection throughout the South East Asia. Moreover, reduction in government funding has also weakened families’ abilities to provide its basic food, lodging needs. As a result, Cambodia had become an easy target for sexual predators to prey on young and innocent children.

To better understand the silent tragedy incurred by these children, ACWP members had made trips (out-of-pocket expense) to Cambodia every year since 2004 such as Phnom Penh and Svay Pak. As ACWP members traveled further into these regions, the staff witnessed severe conditions such as young girls providing sex services, being victims of sexual abuse and sexual transmitted disease (STD) such as HIV/AIDS.

Svay Pak is a notorious brothel village in Kampuchea, where very young girls are often sold or trafficked from the Southwest regions of Vietnam. Virgin girls between ages 7 and 12 are being paid very high by demand. Many foreign businessmen are willing to pay as high as $500-600 USD per week for the possession of these girls. For this reason, prostitution becomes the only source of income and survival for families who lives in the surrounding areas. Based on ACWP quick survey, the majority of these children are of Vietnamese descent.

The predominant key factors to this extreme form of child labor appear to be: children who born into poverty are sold to brothel owners by their families, while others become victims of hoax job offers.

Many Vietnamese families residing in remote villages in Kampuchea struggle under mass poverty and have limited access to job opportunities. Children are often malnourished and are forced to use their bodies as a solution to crises spawned by family poverty, either by being sold into prostitution or being hoaxed into thinking that they have legitimate job offers, as simple as serving coffee and working in restaurants. These young girls are often being beaten and physically abused by their pimps and brothel owners when they refuse to provide sex services to grown men.

Among these young girls, many of them want to escape extreme poverty and violence at home, or voluntarily but temporarily give up their freedom to meet a debt or other unfulfilled obligation to their families. These families frequently have alcoholic parents, gamblers, drug addicts and/or one or both parents absent from the family structure due to divorce, death or separation.

ACWP members also visited a school nearby Svay Pak village. With current shortages of funding in Cambodia as a whole, finding an affordable classroom has become challenging. There are approximately 90 children packed into a small classroom with only one instructor available. Even so, the result has been positive. Being involved with school and work, many young girls have been prevented from being sold to brothels or becoming victims to the sex industry and are being helped to break away from prostitution for good.

Not being able to obtain Cambodian citizenship, Vietnamese refugees have become victims of discrimination, prejudice and are targets of violent hate crimes perpetrated by native Cambodians, such as fire assaults, physical threats and demands of bribery from corrupt local police. There is no existing law enforcement system to protect the children’s rights. As a result, Kampuchea easily becomes a target for sexual predators, such as child traffickers, perpetrators of sexual abuse and many other illegal sexual practices. In the early 1990s, the percentage of child prostitution increased tremendously, reaching rates three times higher than in previous years. With the absence of legal support combined with their illegal status, these young girls are at hazardous risk of extreme sexual abuse and exploitation, as well as psychological and physical threats.

Major obstacles that led these children to prostitution are their limited opportunities for education and vocational training. Primary contributing factors that hinder the children’s education are: lack of citizenship privileges, illiteracy among parents and obligation to family debt, lack guidance, negligence, and social exclusion.

The three main cases in which the children become victims of child trafficking are:

1) Extreme poverty - the parents/guardians sell their own children for a few hundred dollars.

2) Extreme poverty - the children are tricked and lured into thinking they will work for a coffee shop but instead they are sold into brothels to become sex slaves to grown men (included are American tourists according Dateline NBC investigations).

3) The children are kidnapped by sexual predators and become commodities to exchange for cash.

Once the children are placed in the brothels, they are often beaten and sold from one brothel to the next. They fear for their lives and live day-by-day, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. Despite the hardships they already have endured, some of these children also contracted sexual diseases and illness as a result of their forced work.