Life beyond sexual exploitation
Yasha is an outreach to women in Stoke affected by street prostitution. We recognise that street prostitution is rarely a ‘life-style choice’ but is often symptomatic of historic issues connected to abuse, trauma and/or deprivation. In many cases it is also strongly associated with addiction and shame.
Our focus is on honouring the woman at the heart of these struggles and on building committed and non-judging relationships where she might re-discover her inestimable worth, her true identity, and her capacity to craft, with support, a different story for herself.
We’re committed to justice for women and to offering practical support to find routes out of sexual exploitation. Working in partnership with other agencies, our mission is to help provide holistic care and support that creates opportunity for a life lived free.
Yasha is a Hebrew word meaning to make safe, to set free, to set in a spacious place free from restriction. But it also describes the result of this action – to be safe, to be free, to be in a spacious place free from restriction. As such it describes both a determined act of intervention and also its settled outcome, and is often used in the Bible to express the heart and initiative of God towards His creation. We want to collaborate with this intention by helping to create the conditions and opportunities that can help women find routes out of exploitation, and also by helping them to discover a place of rest and thriving on the other side.
Although a Christian project, Yasha works with women of all faiths and none and is committed to respecting women’s freedom of choice in this area. The Gospel underpins everything we do but is not presented coercively. We are simply ‘paying forward’ the love and healing that has been poured out into our own lives.