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This is a brief description of the service, please visit their web
site for more information.
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The House Drop-In Centre was founded in
1990 in the vice
district of Johannesburg, South Africa. The House delivers
24-hour services to young girls and women (ages 7 to 23) who are
destitute, engaged in survival-sex work, working in brothels, prostituting on the streets and/or are drug
addicted. |
Key Benefits for Clients
- Ready supply of free condoms and clean needles.
- A safe place to go in times of crises
- A resource centre for referral to welfare agencies, drug rehab,
judicial and medical help.
- A 'ladies only' place--away from pimps, even if just for a while
- Serves peanut butter sandwiches and a cup of coffee 2X per day--for
many young people on the street this constitutes their only source of
protein for the day
- Sleepover facilities for those who want out of the street--in by
18:00 and leave only at 11:00 the next morning after cleaning up and
cooking breakfast. Not the kind of place that pleases the
prostituting addict who need to work at night and drug all the
time. This is phase one of straightening out.
- A young-ones section is reserved for children from the street under
the age of 15. Here the 8 and 13 year-olds can escape the very
'mature' brothel life and come be a child--if only for a moment each
day--until she decides to make use of our ever present offer for
shelter and social welfare services.
Key Benefits for Society
- Delivers more than 400 000 condoms and 12 000 needles to
prostituting youth every year--primary preventative care for the
spread of HIV.
- An only resource for the runaway girl child in a city of 5 million
people. Johannesburg, being the 'bright-light-night-life' city of South Africa,
draws teenagers from all over the country.
- A grassroots organisation keeping up to date with the latest
movements in the drug and child prostitution sub-cultures.
- Provides an average of 37 000 meals to otherwise destitute young
female people every year.
- Provides an average of 14 000 nights of emergency shelter to
otherwise destitute female youth every year.
- The entire project costs as much to run as a good attorney earns
in a month.
Capabilities
- Trust of the street
- Unlike welfare services, police and other authorities, The House has
earned the trust of the runaway child and has a solid street
reputation for being able to help without involving the authorities or
necessarily notifying parents and guardians...
- We fill the gap
between the street sub-culture (which hides, addict and prostitutes
young people) and statutory care agencies (which scare children with
their courts, out-of-touch social workers, their laws and their need
to do things by the book).
- Street Work
- The House has the ability to do extensive street work in brothels,
sleazy hotels and on street corners and places where young runaways
gather--but we lack resources (people and money). Although we do
street work every day, we are not even skimming the tip of the
iceberg.
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