28th March 2013
Dear Talmage
In response to your letter of 28th
March, I have three initial questions:
Does Hagar insist that its clients attend Christian church
services?
Does Hagar actively seek to convert Cambodian Buddhists to
Christianity?
Does Hagar encourage or allow its clients to practice the
religion of their parents and family? This will, for the most part be Buddhism
but may also be Islam.
The answers to these questions do
not necessitate any breach of Hagar’s code of client confidentiality. The
answers are, however, relevant to Hagar’s being in receipt of AusAID and raise
the question:
Should Australian tax dollars be used to convert Cambodian Buddhists
to Christianity?
These questions are pertinent to
the observation I made in my letter of 28th March:
“This young woman claims that Hagar gave her no choice but to
take part in Citipointe church activities. Is this possible?”
I ask again:
Is it possible that this young woman could have been forced by
Hagar to attend Christian services run by Citipointe church?
The answer to this questions does
not necessitate any breach of client confidentiality.
It is difficult to know, from the
different statistics you have quoted in your letter, which category the young
woman I have written about fits into. Regardless of which category, my question
remains:
“Is it possible that the young woman in question’s access to her
family could have been limited to 2 hours per annum?”
This young woman was not a victim
of Human Trafficking but was deemed to be ‘at risk’. Both she and her family
deny that she was ever at risk and, from what I have observed of her family
this past six years, I have seen no evidence that she or her younger siblings
have ever been at risk of the kind that would warrant removal from the family.
The ‘at risk’ category is so vague, however, as to include any girl (in
particular) who supplements the family income by working on the street. I wrote
about one such young woman in a recent blog entry:
http://citipointechurch.blogspot.in/2013/03/an-alternative-approach-to-rescuing.html
Despite this blog entry receiving
over 100 page views, mostly in Cambodia, not one NGO has made contact with me
to ask if there is anything it can do to help this young woman. The 10 year old
version of herself, today, selling water on the streets of Phnom Penh to help
put herself through school and lessen the financial load on her mother would no
doubt be considered to be ‘at risk’ by Hagar and Citipointe and removed from
her family – breaking the heart of her mother, as Chanti and Chhork’s hearts
have been broken by the forced removal of their daughters Rosa and Chita. Close
to five years down the track, no reason has been given to Chanti and Chhork why
their daughters were removed and nor have they been provided with copies of any
documents that prove that this removal was legal.
In the interests of transparency
and accountability, another question:
Who decides whether or not a young woman (or girl) is ‘at risk’?
Is this an assessment made by MOSAVY – which then makes contact with an NGO such
as Hagar or Citipointe’s She Refuge Home? Or is the ‘at risk’ assessment made
by NGOs such as Hagar and Citipointe’s?
If such assessments are made by
people such as the one who wrote about ‘Srey’, this should set alarm bells
ringing within, MOSAVY, AusAID, Chab Dai and LICADHO:
http://citipointechurch.blogspot.in/2013/03/citipointe-churchs-hope-and-resilience.html
More questions:
If a girl/young woman is deemed to be at risk by an NGO or
MOSAVY, what role do the girl’s parents play in the decision that the
girl/woman be placed in care? Are they consulted at all? Are their rights as
parents explained to them? Are they appraised as to what they must do to have
their children returned to their care? Are there specific bench marks the
parents must meet and, having met them, their children are returned to their
care? Is the decision to return the children to the care of their families one
made by Hagar and ratified by MOSAVY or does MOSAVY conduct its own independent
assessment?
I am referring here to girls considered
to be ‘at risk’; not to girls/women who are actual victims of Human
Trafficking.
Given that I am both making a
documentary and writing a book (both entitled CHANTI’S WORLD) some context
might be useful here:
In 2007, in the course of my
filming, I came upon the family of the young Hagar ‘client’ I have referred to.
She had been a major bread winner for the family until she was deemed to be ‘at
risk’ by Hagar and removed from the family. This resulted in her younger
siblings (one aged six) having to step into her shoes to make up the shortfall
in family income. It is worth mentioning that all the children in their family
were attending school in the morning and working on the streets of Phnom Penh
in the afternoon. It is also worth mentioning that I have encountered several
instances of this: one teenage breadwinner being ‘rescued’ by an NGO whilst the
rest of the family is left to its own devices – forcing younger siblings to
work in situations that place them at precisely the same ‘risk’ that resulted
in their older sister being ‘rescued’. In each and every case that I am
familiar with, no aid was offered to the rest of the family to make it
unnecessary for the younger siblings to work. In each and every case the
younger siblings were also going to school. Indeed, they were paying their own
school fees. In many instances I have stepped in and paid their school fees
personally to lessen the necessity for them to work on the streets of Phnom
Penh. In the case of the young former ‘client’ of Hagar who has received not
one cent in financial assistance from Hagar since she turned 19 I am often in
the position of buying rice for her family.
In each and every case in which a
girl/woman I know who has been rescued by a Christian NGO, they have been sent
on their way by the NGO at the age of 18 or 19 and offered no further
assistance. In virtually every instance that I know of, the young women in
question have, within two years, become mothers, having received no (or
inadequate) instruction in the use of contraception whilst in care or, to use
your terminology, whilst ‘clients’ of Hagar.
It may be, of course, that my
‘straw poll’ (every former ‘client’ of a Christian NGO pregnant by age 21) is
in no way representative of what happens to young women when they leave
Citipointe or Hagar. If so I would be very interested to know what percentage
of former Hagar clients become mothers by the age of 21 and how they are faring
in economic terms two, three and five years after they cease to be ‘clients’.
Does Hagar know? If so and given that no breach of client confidentiality is
required, can Hagar provide me with any statistics relating to the success or
otherwise of its programs? And, in the event that Hagar can provide evidence
for the success of its programs, are such assessments made by Hagar itself or
by some independent body? Self assessment is, as I am sure you can appreciate,
full of pitfalls – especially when a negative assessment might impact on both
donations and aid received from organizations such as AusAID. If, for instance,
a significant proportion of Hagar ‘clients’, five years after leaving Hagar,
are single mothers living in poverty and alienated from their family and
culture as a result of forced conversion to Christianity, why should either
donors or AusAID be providing aid to Hagar?
Again, I extend to Hagar an
invitation to present its own account of its activities in my documentary
CHANTI’S WORLD. I would not be seeking any comment on individual cases but
merely answers to questions such a the ones I have asked here that do not
involve any breach of client confidentiality.
best wishes
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