What words mean to us.

Sex Trade

We use this term to mean all the different ways that girls and young women (and others too) trade sex for money, gifts, drugs, or survival needs, including exotic dancing, escorting, lingerie modeling, phone sex, adult internet sites, movies & more. Sometimes other people can arrange it. It can be part of surviving on the street or in a girl’s neighborhood. We are always learning more ways and always adding our experiences to this definition.

Street Economy

Anti-Oppression

Free of Judgment

Because YWEP is by and for girls and young women who have life experience in the sex trade, we really value our space being open and feeling safe to everyone. We respect wherever girls are at and we don’t say someone has to leave the sex trade in order to be a part of anything we do. In fact, girls can even be completely anonymous and still come to our project.

Confidential

Some of the activities at YWEP are anonymous- but ALL activities at YWEP are CONFIDENTIAL. This means that that we don’t keep files on anyone, we don’t ask for any kind of ID, and we never give information about girls to anyone. It also means that we don’t ask girls to tell us their life story and we don’t ask bunches of questions.

Anonymous

At YWEP, girls never have to give us their real names unless they get hired to work for us. We don’t ask for identification and we don’t try to find out more than people want to share with us at the time. We value that girls can come in and talk to an outreach worker or youth worker, pick up some condoms, food or information without ever telling us anything about herself. This is really important because a lot of girls have been betrayed by other providers and don’t trust that we are for real about respecting a girl’s privacy. If we think that someone’s confidentiality or anonymity is going to be compromised by something they are participating in with us- like a workshop, outreach or other things, we talk about it really openly so everyone can decide for themselves whether or not they want to be involved.