There’s a paradox at the heart of prevention. In the complex field of trafficking, exploitation, and online abuse of teen-girls, the most powerful work often goes unnoticed. No dramatic rescues. No arrests. Just quiet success: a girl who never dropped out of school, never migrated unsafely, never responded to that message from a stranger online.
How do you prove what didn’t happen though?
At AusCam Freedom Project, This is the question we face every day and it’s one we believe the whole sector must keep asking if we’re truly committed, as a community, to ending trafficking and exploitation.
Most anti-trafficking efforts focus on response: rescuing survivors, prosecuting traffickers, and rehabilitating the harmed. These are essential. We cannot build a world where girls are safe, however, if we’re always arriving after the harm is done.
That’s why AusCam exists: to prevent exploitation before it begins by equipping vulnerable girls—currently in Cambodia—with the tools, knowledge, and support they need to stay safe and in control of their futures.
Prevention is a moral imperative. Importantly, though, it’s a smarter, more sustainable strategy. It’s also more cost-effective and more life-affirming for girls who get to live their lives uninterrupted by violence.
What prevention looks like
Our prevention model supports girls to:
- Stay in school and avoid early dropout
- Learn to recognise and reject online grooming
- Access safe mentorship, counselling, and crisis support early
- Develop critical life skills and leadership capacity
- Build strong peer networks and solidarity through our network of Safe Sisters
Our Life Skills and Leadership Programs equip girls with the tools to make informed decisions, set goals, and advocate for themselves and others. Our volunteer network of Safe Sisters is a peer-led circle of empowered teen-girls who champion safety, respect, and resilience in their own communities.
We work with girls, families, schools, and communities to create a web of protection around each girl. We show up before the risk takes root, so that we can help a girl understand that she’s at risk and help her to protect herself.
We walk alongside girls before the crisis arrives.
Using innovation & technology to strengthen our prevention model
Our ongoing innovation ensures we meet girls where they already are – online and on their phones – and provide tools that make prevention scalable and measurable.
- Freedom Line (launched April 2020) – Cambodia’s first and still only teen‑girl helpline, which is a 24/7, free service that offers confidential support via phone, Facebook messenger, and other local platforms.
- Evidence‑based digital risk‑assessment tool – A clinically designed questionnaire (digitised in 2023) that is a resource for the Freedom Line program and which guides our social workers—and now girls themselves—to evaluate exploitation risk across 12 indicators and receive a tailored support plan.
- Neary, our virtual safe sister (launched April 2024) – A chatbot—part of the Freedom Line program—which is an alternative to one of our social workers, and that hosts the self‑assessment tool in Khmer and provides anonymous, teen‑friendly guidance.
- Safe Sister digital influencers – a cohort of trained teen-girls who lead peer campaign groups, creating Facebook and community content that promotes the Freedom Line and reaches thousands of Cambodian teens every week.
- Real‑time data & insights – Usage analytics from Neary and digital platforms that help us spotlight emerging trends, refine messaging, and strengthen our monitoring and evaluation framework.
- Internal culture of innovation – A dynamic innovation culture – supported by powerful internal-capability CHAT lessons of Cooperation, Human-centered design, Action learning, and Technology integration—that, by being embedded throughout our operations and activities, amplifies our social impact.
How we measure impact
Prevention is hard to photograph. There’s no “before and after” when the before never happens. Nevertheless, we’ve identified real markers of success in prevention work and how to monitor them. We’ve gained some important insights through our extensive experience that we’ve harnessed to effectively measure and track impact:
- Risk reduction: Are fewer girls dropping out of school or migrating unsafely?
- Knowledge and behavior change: Can girls identify online threats and set boundaries?
- Help-seeking: Are girls disclosing unsafe situations to trusted mentors or reaching out to our Freedom Line?
- Community shifts: Are parents/caregivers more engaged? Are social norms changing?
We also track how girls build protection through extending their own social capital by helping them become aware of and develop their internal and external personal assets. These social capital factors—such as self-esteem, problem-solving, adult support, and peer connection—appear to enhance exploitation resistance.
We assist girls to regularly self-assess their strengths and needs and, with support from mentors, take active steps to build their protection assets and integrate them into their daily lives. This developmental asset approach, that we’ve found girls embrace, allows us to monitor increasing personal and social capacity, not only reduced risk.
_________________________________________________________________________________
A Call to Funders, Practitioners, and Policymakers
If you fund or work in the anti-trafficking space, I urge you to ask:
- Are we investing enough in upstream solutions?
- Are we tracking the right indicators of success?
- Are we truly listening to girls’ lived experiences, insights, and ideas? Are we actively involving them in shaping solutions that affect their lives?
Because when we invest in prevention, we stop trafficking. More importantly, though, we unlock the potential of a generation of strong resilient girls.
Join the Conversation
At AusCam, we’re proud to be building a prevention model that works—and measuring it in ways that matter. If you’re doing similar work, we’d love to learn from you. If you’re funding prevention, we’d love to partner.Let’s make the unseen visible—and the invisible measurable.
