Protecting Cambodia’s Children Since 2003
APLE investigates abuse, supports survivors, and builds the systems that stop harm before it starts — nationwide, for every child.
Our Guiding Mission
We are Cambodia’s only child protection organization delivering the full spectrum of this work — detection, investigation, prosecution, crisis intervention, legal aid, psychosocial recovery, and community prevention — under one roof. That range is not a coincidence. It is what two decades on the ground has shown us a child actually needs.
Vision: A community where every child is free from sexual exploitation and abuse.
Mission: To strengthen the justice, protection, and community systems that prevent child sexual exploitation and abuse, respond when it occurs, and ensure accountability for those who harm children.
We hold two convictions at once. First, that response cannot wait: a child in danger needs rescue, investigation, and care now, not eventually. Second, that response alone is not enough: unless families, schools, industries, and laws also change, the same harm returns. Everything APLE does sits somewhere on that line between rescuing a child today and making sure fewer children need rescuing tomorrow.
Why This Matters Now
An estimated 160,000 Cambodian children aged 12 to 17 — roughly one in nine internet-using children — have experienced online sexual exploitation or abuse, according to the 2022 Disrupting Harm study. Cambodia’s National Council for Children identifies 60% of children as at risk. In 2025 alone, reports to APLE’s hotline rose by 46.5% over the previous year, and the abuse itself is changing shape faster than most institutions can track it: AI-generated abuse material, financial sextortion, and offending that migrates to encrypted platforms are now as real a threat as the abuse that happens in a classroom or a hotel room.
Girls make up nearly nine in ten identified victims. Children from low-income families, ethnic minorities, rural communities, children with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ children are disproportionately affected. This is not a rare problem happening somewhere else. It is a present, growing one — and it is why APLE’s work cannot stand still either.
How Protection Works
APLE’s work runs as one connected pipeline, not six separate programs. Prevention stops harm before it begins. Detection makes hidden harm visible. Response acts on what detection finds. Evidence and survivor voice turn frontline experience into learning. Policy reform turns that learning into lasting protection. And organisational resilience is the foundation that keeps all of it running. Each stage feeds the next — and feeds back into the one before it.
Before Harm Begins
Equipping families, schools, and communities to recognise and prevent exploitation before it happens.
Bringing Harm to Light
Operating Cambodia’s only INHOPE-compliant internet hotline, using AI-supported detection to find hidden abuse online.
Justice for Every Child
Investigating cases, supporting prosecutions, and holding offenders accountable alongside police and courts.
Evidence with a Voice
Turning frontline experience and survivor input into research that improves practice and policy.
Closing the Legal Gap
Advocating for laws and enforcement that keep pace with how exploitation is evolving.
The Foundation That Holds
The financial stability, governance, and workforce that let this work continue for the next child, and the one after that.
Two Decades Of Action
APLE began in 2003 as an international NGO with a single, unambiguous purpose: protect children, support survivors, and strengthen justice against sexual exploitation and abuse. What that has meant in practice has grown with every year.
We started where the need was most immediate — inside the justice system. Early work focused on strengthening criminal investigations and prosecutions, introducing child-friendly court procedures, and building the first partnerships with police, prosecutors, and social services.
As casework grew, so did our understanding that justice alone doesn’t heal a child. We formalised victim support — counselling, legal guidance, coordinated referrals — introduced structured case management, and began training the travel and tourism sector, one of the industries most exposed to exploitation risk.
We launched the APLE Internet Hotline and joined INHOPE, the international network of hotlines fighting child sexual abuse material. Overnight, our reach extended from a courtroom in Phnom Penh to a takedown request reaching a platform on another continent.
We scaled community, media, and industry engagement — training hotels, guesthouses, tour operators, tuk-tuk drivers, and market vendors on child protection, while promoting responsible, non-sensationalising reporting language across Cambodian media.
Today, our work runs through joint task forces with ministries, police, schools, and industry — moving policy from paper into daily practice, scaling public awareness, and strengthening the monitoring systems that prove what’s working and what isn’t. Our OCSEA training manual is now formally taught inside the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and the Cambodian National Police Academy.
Our Plan Through 2030
Two decades of casework taught us where the gaps still are. Our Strategic Plan for 2026–2030 is our answer: by 2030, we aim to see families and schools mobilised as active agents of prevention, Cambodia’s detection systems internationally benchmarked and equipped for AI-generated threats, over 90% of identified survivors receiving coordinated care within 24 hours, survivors formally shaping the services built for them, targeted legal reforms enacted for emerging forms of abuse, and an organisation resilient enough — financially and organisationally — to keep every one of those promises past the life of any single grant.
None of this is aspiration without a plan behind it. Every target above sits inside a results framework we track, report on, and will be held to — because a child in Cambodia should be able to count on protection that outlasts a funding cycle.
Who Leads This Work
APLE is governed by a Board of Directors who provide strategic oversight so our work stays effective, ethical, and accountable to the children we serve, supported by a multidisciplinary team of lawyers, investigators, counsellors, social workers, hotline analysts, trainers, and policy advocates.
Every person at APLE works under the same guiding principles: the best interests of the child, do-no-harm, dignity and confidentiality, child participation in age-appropriate ways, non-discrimination, and due process. We follow strict safeguarding standards — safe recruitment, child protection policy, data privacy, and a whistleblowing mechanism — because an organization protecting children must first be able to prove it protects them from itself.
Two decades of protecting children in Cambodia were made possible by people who chose to act rather than look away. The next five years need the same.