Woman priest, abused as child, rescues prostitutes; now they make scented lotions

ALABAMA
AL.com

By Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The Rev. Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest, rescues prostitutes and puts them to work making scented lotions and soaps.

Stevens will be in Birmingham on Wednesday to talk about the ministry, speaking at Canterbury United Methodist Church in Mountain Brook at 6:30 p.m. The event is open to the public.

“I’m bringing the message that love heals, and we don’t have to leave anybody behind,” Stevens said.

In 2000, she started Thistle Farms in Nashville, an outgrowth of her ministry, the Magdalene residential community, that rescues women and offers them a job.

“We have a manufacturing company that manufactures and sells bath and body products, oils, lotions, soaps, candles,” Stevens said.

The business enterprise keeps growing. “So many people were coming,” Stevens said. “So we opened a café.”

Stevens felt the need to help other women because of her own experience as a child.

“At 5, my father was killed by drunk driver,” she said. “My dad was an Episcopal priest. After his death, an elder in church sexually abused me, in the church. That’s the beginning of where this ministry started for me. I needed to believe that there was a healing community. I felt a need to reach out to women on the streets.”

Most of the prostitutes she meets were child rape victims first. “They typically experience their first rape between age 7 and 11, and hit the streets at 14 or 15,” she said.

From 2005-2012, 80 percent of the women who came to Thistle Farms graduated from the program clean and sober, Stevens said. “We employ over 70 women, 50 of them graduates of the program,” she said. “They work through a recovery program. Women heal and they go back and heal whole communities.”

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.