I love being an artist and leading this organisation. I am driven by an unshakeable knowing that art can change the world and a deep respect for survivor creativity. I believe that child sexual abuse survival is an inherently creative act.
When there was no one to talk to, most of us were daydreaming, doodling, writing songs and poems, dancing and making imaginary worlds.
We have become involuntary experts in dissociation, derealisation and masking, in themselves deeply intelligent and creative acts.
Creativity has kept me alive and made my life worth living. All of my work is about harnessing the creativity in our community to a radical agenda of social change.
When I introduce myself at an event I always say the same thing “Hi. I’m Viv and I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse.” I know everyone already knows that, but I also know some people will have never heard someone say that loud and proud before, and that matters because we can’t make change if we can’t say the words. Survivors reading this will know how people look at you differently when you disclose. My favourite response is “Don’t panic. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it”.
I didn’t. Multiple perpetrators did. They sexually abused me through the first 10 years of my life. Like many abused in infancy, I had dissociative amnesia and didn’t remember until I was 29. The time of “not knowing” was chaos – depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, self-injury, chronic migraines and cystitus, starving myself, obsessive behaviours, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness.
Remembering was so incredibly painful and living as a survivor is ongoingly challenging but I am proud of my survival (and yours) Knowledge is power. And here are some things I now know.
Only the perpetrators are responsible for abuse. All the shame, guilt and stigma survivors carry is culturally set up to maintain the patriarchal conditions where abuse and violence continue. When you look at the history of our movement, it’s clear. As survivor disclosure gained momentum so too did the culture of psychiatric diagnosis. The labelling of victims as disordered is the primary social response to child sexual abuse in the global north, not justice and not bringing an end to abuse. Recovery narratives turn our struggle inwards, taking a lot of energy that can be better turned outwards and redirected to resisting the patriarchy.
A turning point for me was reading the NSPCC report that estimates there are 11 million adult CSA survivors in the UK. This figure blew my mind and reframed my own survival as a political experience of marginalisation, discrimination and injustice. CSA survival is defined by absence: absence from cultural discourse; from diversity narratives; and from civic life.
This particular kind of discrimination has a name – discrimination by omission. This injustice also has a name – hermeneutical injustice – where a community is unable to articulate their own oppression because they lack the language and frameworks to do so due to historic systems of exclusion where their voices have not been heard.
Central questions in my work are: Where is our community? How have 11 million of us been kept silent and separate? Where can we gather? How can we find the words to articulate child sexual abuse survival as a social justice issue? And what happens when 11 million people mobilise for social change? I’ll tell you what happens. Revolution.
Art is a place where we can gather, find expression, see ourselves reflected culturally, explore collectivity and feel a long overdue sense of belonging. Creativity is a space of aliveness, a container for rage, hope, tenderness and anarchy.
I see my own artistic practice as an experiment in aliving (a term I recently came across. I’m not surviving, I’m aliving thank you very much). The word experiment literally means “out of risk” and artmaking is a safer place to take risk. I enjoy doing things I don’t think I can do or that feel audacious or out of bounds – shouting about abuse in a punk band, asking disruptive questions, exhibiting images of my body covered in slime, dismantling outworn systems and rebuilding from the grassroots up.
Every time a survivor speaks up, feels joy, makes art or connects with others in community – we are resisting the systems set up to annihilate us. We are each the power of a tiny drop of rain that joined together becomes the river that becomes the unstoppable ocean.
