Survivor-led activism, advocacy and services have been vital to protecting children, supporting adult survivors and advocating for social justice. But it has often been grassroots, underfunded and short-lived - we often only know about it through the memories of activists and the fragments that surface in the archives of feminist and human rights movements.
As people age or pass away, there is significant risk of irreparable loss of both individual and collective memory. The case of Rasjidah St. John, a London-based survivor activist who died in 2017, is indicative - her personal archive was preserved only because of her nieces’ conviction that it should be kept. Yet, without these archives of survival and survivor organising, the role that survivors, activists and advocates played in developing understandings of, and responses to, child sexual abuse since the 1970s are at risk of being forgotten. Dominant political, professional and media narratives will be perpetuated at the expense of those whose voices have been repeatedly silenced.
To counter this Remembering Together will create the first database of survivor-activism, mapping activity across the country from the 1960s to 2024. This will help to identify if archives survive or where oral histories might be collected. It will also show the extent of activity, even if archives don’t survive or can’t be found.
We will collect information via archival research in existing collections, including Rasjidah St. John’s papers and records in feminist libraries and archives. We will also hold a series of witness seminars (late 2026-mid 2027) where activists will come together to share information from their own knowledge and survivor networks. We will collate this into a database which will be published via our website in late 2027.
If you have information about survivor activism histories, please get in touch via our Contact Us page.