Our Vision

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

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Our Mission

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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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Our Practice Pillars:

Remaining loyal to our principles

• Ecological in our understanding of the issues and in designing of a response;

• Contextual safeguarding applied in practice and with partners, and to understand the extent of, and solution to, extra-familial harm;

• Participatory in design and delivery, rooted in young women’s expertise; 

• Solution-focused to build alternative narratives, develop skills, resources,  independence and agency.

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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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