Malisa Home: Our safe house

Combatting sexual exploitation

Human trafficking is one of the largest and fastest growing criminal businesses worldwide. Southeast Asia is one of the centers, with the Philippines as a hotspot for pedophile sex tourism and criminal cybersex offers with under-age children. Even the strict and explicit legal position concerning child abuse and child prostitution has not been able to stem this development. A breeding ground of child trafficking with a rapidly growing cybersex industry is located in Cagayan de Oro. The human traffickers often take advantage of the naivety and poverty of the peasants to lure children to the city with false promises which end in sexual exploitation and dependence.

The Malisa Home offers love, safety and a future perspective

The President of our Board of Trustees, Maria Furtwängler, and her daughter, Elisabeth, together with the German Doctors and subsidies from Sternstunde eV., founded the Malisa Home to offer girls and young women a way out of the morass of sexual exploitation in 2011. The safe house, in which the residents learn how to cope with what they have experienced and to find peace with the past in therapeutic sittings, was built for up to 32 girls. They can finish their schooling and then join a training program or go to college to build up their own, self-determined life. Within the protective environment of the Malisa House, aside from practical life support, they also receive legal advice and support, which most of them didn’t even know about. Aside from continuous support by the Sternstunden e.V., Ein Herz für Kinder (A Heart for Children) has provided subsidies for the Malisa Home since 2015. There is still a great deal to be done…