Team members

Victoria Hoyle is a historian, archivist and survivor ally. She is Senior Lecturer in Public History at the University of York and former Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past. Her historical work is on 20th- and 21st-century child welfare, focusing on participatory research, the co-production of historical knowledge, and working with communities of lived experience. She began working on histories and archives of child sexual abuse in 2017 during her postdoctoral research on the Memory, Identity, Rights in Records and Access (MIRRA) project at UCL. Her first book The Remaking of Archival Values explores how our understanding of archives can be adapted to reflect the needs and interests of people who have experienced inequity, injustice, abuse, and harm.

Professor Alana Harris is a historian of gender and modern religious history who has pioneered an interdisciplinary, 'lived religion' approach to social and cultural histories of faith and belief in modern Britain. As an innovative oral history practitioner, she works with community historians and marginalised groups (e.g. disabled artists, migrants and refugees) to amplify their life histories and voices, including through adapted praxis with speech-impaired interviewees and PTSD IPV survivors. Alongside extensive creative, co-production experience working with artists on historically-informed installations and exhibitions, films and musical compositions, she has pushed extensively in modern and contemporary British history. 

Patricia Debney is a survivor of child sexual abuse, a writer, an activist and a lecturer in creative writing. Her next book, Leaving Locust Avenue, is a memoir about a writer coming of age through child sexual abuse and neglect. Her first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books, 2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. Subsequent collections – Littoral, Gestation, and Baby – are respectively responses to her son’s diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, and her mother’s mental illnesses and dementia. She has also published short stories and a novel. Her work has appeared in Forward Prize anthologies, The Sunday Times, Best British Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2016 and 2018, she was commissioned to write the opening poems of the Pride of Britain Awards (ITV), subsequently broadcast to millions. A Reader at the University of Kent for 20 years, she is currently a creative writing Tutor at the University of Cambridge, as well as a freelance mentor and facilitator.

Jane Chevous is a survivor of child abuse, sexual exploitation as a teenager and rape/spiritual abuse as a young adult. She has fore-fronted participation and lived experience over 40 years work in youth work, social care, lifelong-learning and children's rights fields, and is a member of the Society of Education and Training (SET). She leads Survivors Voices, a survivor-led organisation which runs peer support networks and turns the pain of abuse into power to change society’s response to trauma, through research, creative arts and education. She co-led the creation the Survivor Charter and the Survivor Research Involvement Ladder, and the Abuse Survivor Researcher Network.  She is a member of the Society for Education and Training (SET), the Violence, Abuse & Mental Health Network (VAMHN), an associate researcher with King’s College London, and is Vice-Chair of the Church of England National Safeguarding Panel, as a survivor organisation representative. With an MSC in Mental Health Recovery and Social Inclusion, her research focuses on participation and lived experience involvement, and she has led Survivors Voices work in this area with several research collaborations. A writer publishing on abuse and mental health, creative writing, spirituality and sailing, she explores all these themes at Barefoot Tales.

A creative soul who likes to take the scenic route through life, Catherine uses her background in Music and the Creative Arts to bring people together. Alongside trying out all things creative Catherine has special interests in neuro-diversity, trauma effects and recovery, and Spiritual wellbeing. Catherine looks after our Peer Support team and leads on our Monday evening Faith & Abuse group, so you'll find her on the other end of the peer support email address. As well as facilitating in our Peer Support groups you might also find Catherine using her creative skills in other Survivor-focussed projects and trauma-informed faith work, including producing artwork for Survivors' Voices Press, infographics for Research Project outcomes, imagery and videos for education and activism, performing her own music for reflection & healing (https://barefootpianoprayers.bandcamp.com), and sharing some of her artwork and contemplative writing at https://anartistsresponse.wordpress.com.