Tag: Epstein survivors

are we finally at #metooCSA?

So. I spent the first nine months of 2025 feeling pretty freaked out: everything seemed worse, and likely to keep getting worse. Pillars of what most people in the world have taken to be truths and even basic human rights crumbled and continued to crumble. I for one felt that the ground I had stood on my whole life was shifting, inexorably. And I know I wasn’t the only one. I know so many felt this and continue to feel it. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed yet in any real way.

As I mentioned in my last post, the overriding feeling for me through this became the one I dread possibly the most: we were being silenced. At every turn.

Then came the US government shutdown and the Epstein files saga. And I started to notice: wait, survivors are standing up together. With allies. At least some people are starting to build some momentum.

And then, Virginia Giuffre’s powerful memoir, Nobody’s Girl. It was being read — albeit with a kind of horror still — but it was being read. Not everyone was turning away. It was not ‘niche’ reading. It was not in a bubble. It was mainstream.

Guiffre’s experiences in her childhood home and beyond have the exact shape and tone — down to what is said, the manipulation, the physical responses of her abusers — of not only my own experiences as a victim survivor, but the experiences of every survivor I have spoken to about it.

But she then goes on. She places the abuses in the context of our cultures and our societies. She makes clear that she was not the exception. That child sexual abuse is endemic. And that it’s all about power. Many — across mainstream media, and certainly across socials — sat up and took notice in ways I’ve not seen before.

If you haven’t read the book — read it. It may be triggering for some of you, so take care. And some of you will find it very upsetting. What I would say to that is: welcome to our world. Survivors carry aspects of her story — as she did — every day, day in, day out. We don’t have the luxury of ‘not engaging’ with abuse. We have lived it, and it will never go away.

I’m just stating facts.

***

It’s tempting to turn away from activism — whether quiet or loud — because more often than not it meets with disbelief, horror, embarrassment, or dismissal.

And yet, somehow this latest series of events hasn’t skidded to a stop at a dead end. Somehow a ball is still rolling.

In 2017, the #metoo movement went viral. Begun by a survivor of child sexual abuse, Tarana Burke several years before, it gathered sexual violence as a whole under its umbrella. Various offshoots developed, including #metooinceste, which started in France.

However. From my and other CSA survivors’ I know points of view — we never really felt heard with #metoo. Like so many, I have been sexually assaulted as an adult, and I felt #metoo supported these disclosures. But despite the origins of the phrase, I never felt that it could hold Child Sexual Abuse, or CSA. The viral wave swept it elsewhere. Soon, any hint of #metoo in relation to CSA simply disappeared.

Something is happening now though. Does anyone else feel it? NOT just around Epstein and his cronies (including we know who). But around the whole space of CSA. In the last six weeks or so, my Threads and Bluesky and even Instagram feeds have been flooded with disclosures, with CSA survivors who have never before gone public about the abuse they suffered — now feeling safe to disclose, or that it’s necessary to disclose, or that they know it’s time to disclose, to connect some dots, to be here in solidarity. And the vast majority of these disclosures identify family and family friends as perpetrators. Unsurprisingly.

One way or another I’ve been working in this space for about six years. And almost the whole time, I have felt that my words, my experiences, my desire to connect and amplify — to make a change, somehow — have had almost no impact beyond the (beautiful!) survivor activism community. My greatest frustration — the thing which has done me in time and time again over the years — has been the sense that we are not being heard. That no one is really — really — listening.

I feel a shift now, though. A lasting shift, I hope. A solidarity across ‘types’ of sexual abuse is coming to the fore, a space for all survivor stories and testimonies. As are vocal allies, who are saying over and over, in public and on socials: ‘listen to survivors’, ‘believe the survivors’. I am sensing that there is a gathering together of activists, survivors, and allies into what we have long been working for: a survivor-led #metooCSA movement. We are gaining critical mass — for our voices, and for change.

Thank you always Tarana Burke, for your courage, and your words.

A Year Later: starting 2026

[image from Juneau Empire]

I have been writing and re-writing this post in my head for months.

What happened? I considered this for weeks.

What I did not want to admit (to myself, or anyone) was how completely shaken I was by the re-election of an abuser to the White House. His re-emergence, followed by lawless action after lawless action, rendered me almost paralysed.

What is the point of working away in my small corner of the fight against Violence Against Women and Girls, when the whole world order has turned justice on its head?

More pointedly: every survivor I know hears an abuser in his voice. An abuser, and a bully. We have all known this since at least 2015. We all recognise it. And for the last 10 years, we have not been heard. And as we all know: when we talk and no one hears, we are silenced, again.

It took me several months to realise that I was simultaneously triggered and silenced by happenings in the US. Again and again I felt that any voice I had ever had was useless. I see now that I have spent the last year being re-traumatised, over and over.

The reality is: the country where I grew up is being dismantled. The values I thought we all shared (more or less) have evaporated. Any ‘noise’ I might be able to make surely disappears into thin air.

I remain pessimistic when it comes to the US managing to take care of its people. This feels a very long way from achievable at the moment.

However. In the last few months, the plight of the Epstein survivors, and the involvement of men and women who occupy the most wealthy and powerful positions in the world in their trafficking — have crashed my worlds together.

Thing is: we are all the same. As survivors, we are all the same. Whatever our backgrounds, whomever our abusers. Whether ‘it’ happens once, or repeatedly over years and years or perpetrator after perpetrator: we must join forces. Our homes (or lack thereof) made us vulnerable to sexual abuse; in this, we are a community.

We must not allow the isolation that inevitably accompanies our abuse to silence us. We must not consider some peoples’ experiences of abuse more harmful or ‘worse’ than others. We must understand that we are in this together, all of us.

Only then will we be able build upon the voices and experiences of survivors toward real cultural and social change: toward accountability, restitution, prevention.

I come to this post today through partially gritted teeth. I’m not sure if any of this will do any ‘good’. But I can’t not try. The last year has shown this to me in technicolour: I have to keep trying. I have to. The one thing I know is that I would do anything to save a child from going through what one in six of us goes through, worldwide. To that end, I have managed to keep going with a couple of projects, quietly, which will soon come to a kind of fruition. But I know I need to use my voice too, publicly. It’s so important that we do this if we can. And I can.

So here I am. More soon.