Abianda’s vision is that young women and girls are free from oppression and harm caused by criminal exploitation and violence.

 

Our mission is to support young women harmed by criminal exploitation and violence to develop independence and agency. We do this through:

• The provision of specialist one-to-one and contextual safeguarding services, which increase safety, skills, self-advocacy and agency;

• Working with national and local services to challenge and change their approaches, through the delivery of our training and systems change programmes;

• Building a network of young women and girls who can disrupt and re-design policy and practice to create lasting impact.

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Our Principles

We believe that:

• Young women are experts on their own lives

• Young women have innate resources, competence and resilience

• People affected by a problem are best placed to find the solutions

• We must shift traditional power hierarchies in service delivery in order to enable young women's participation in solution-building

• We must support young women to have their voices heard in order that they can influence the design and delivery of services

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We therefore adopt:

• Youth work principles

• Participation principles

• Solution-focused brief therapy techniques

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Youth Work Principles

In our approach we:

• Work ‘alongside’ young women

• Start from where they are and are led by their “felt needs”

• Respect their empirical knowledge of their own lives

• Encourage them to develop a “critical consciousness” of their worlds, their experiences, and how they are affected by these

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Participation Principles

In our approach we:

• Work in a non-hierarchical way

• Challenge unequal dynamics of power & oppression

• Tip the balance of power in favour of young women

• Ensure young women inform future practice and services

• Recognise that young women are best placed to identify issues and solutions

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Solution-focused Brief Therapy Techniques

In our approach we:

• Work to the young woman’s ‘best hopes’ or desired outcomes

• Engage with competence

• Look for alternative narratives of her and her life where she has previously demonstrated competence

• Obtain detailed descriptions of what life will be like when changes are made

• Trust the young woman’s ‘version of events’

• Are interested in the young woman and not the problem

• Develop techniques to understand and strategise around big and sometimes ‘unmanageable’ feelings

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