Tahanan Sta. Luisa is a crisis intervention and recovery center for street girls in Metro Manila, Philippines who have been traumatized by multiple kinds of abuse and sexual exploitation. Tahanan helps the girls recover in body, mind, and spirit. Tahanan believes education, life skills training, and recreational activities help girls recover and enhance their feelings of self-worth and dignity, and enable them to reintegrate into regular community life.
More Filipino street girls are vulnerable to abuse and sexual exploitation. Data from the Abused Children's Fund show that 100, 000 Filipino children are sexually abused, 60, 000 of them are prostituted and 1 in 4 Filipino girls are sexually abused prior to the age of 18. Government residential care facilities in Manila for street girls cannot keep up with the demand for their rehabilitation. Often crowded, these are not fully equipped to provide the quality service and care for street girls.
Tahanan focuses on a holistic approach to rehabilitation and has adopted the "Caring, Healing and Teaching" framework. We take care of our girls by providing them with basic needs, e.g. food, clothing, shelter, residential care. We help our girls heal through psycho-social interventions, counseling, therapies, medical and dental provisions. We teach our girls non-formal and alternative basic education, life skills training, income generating projects, and spiritual and values clarification.
The project will help street girls start their inner healing process so that they can rebuild their lives and be able to live normally and productively in the future. Tahanan seeks to empower street girls by opening opportunities for them to recover, harness their potentials and skills, start anew, and regain their worth and dignity. We hope that through the "caring, teaching, and healing" framework, we are able to help end the cycle of abuse for a street girl, her family, and her community.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
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