What might survivor-centred archives look like? Remembering Together is a participatory action research project to create a framework in which to safely and meaningfully preserve histories, archives and memories of child sexual abuse survivor activism from the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
About
Survivors’ campaigning was (and remains) often transient and poorly funded, leaving no major archival deposits to date. Ephemeral remains can be found in the archives of larger campaigning and feminist organisations, but no single access point is available. Many records remain in private hands, in sheds and on USB sticks. As activists age or pass away, there is risk of irreparable loss. Archives are also routinely destroyed when organisations, under increasing financial pressure, close. Without these records, the role that survivor-activists played in changing responses to child sexual abuse across the last sixty years are obscured. Dominant political and media narratives are perpetuated at the expense of experts by experience, whose persistent activism has been marginalised and undervalued. Remembering Together will innovate participatory approaches and collaborative methods for archiving child sexual abuse survivor campaigning and activism in England, 1960-2024. Potential archives include the records of grassroots collectives and charities, alongside the papers, oral histories, and creative outputs of survivors. The project will define the logistics, considerations, and ethical conditions for survivor centred ‘living archives,’ focusing on agency and consent, to support new opportunities for multi-vocal histories of sexual violence.
Research
The creation and preservation of survivor-centred archives raises fundamental questions. How will be confidentiality, consent and anonymity be handled? What trauma-informed frameworks are needed for transparency and trust?
Remembering Together explores these questions, in collaboration with current survivor-activists and organisations, to produce an archiving toolkit, with detailed protocols and instructions, to be used by survivors, archivists and researchers to support archival creation, preservation and discovery. Pilot studies using survivor-activist archives and oral histories will test and refine the toolkit’s content, producing models to inform future practice. A national discovery exercise to identify extant and lost survivor-activist archives will create an open access database that will map the extent of campaigning for the first time. The project is a collaboration between the research team and a Participatory Research Group of 8 survivor-activists, supported by the survivor-led research organisation Survivors Voices. We are also working with the Archbishop’s Council of the Church of England; the Association of Child Protection Professionals; and the former trustees of CSASS (Chester Sexual Abuse Support Service). The principal output– the toolkit – will provide an ethical framework of state-of-the-art practices for archiving the records of child sexual abuse survivors, which will underpin future research on survival, activism, and organising in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This framework will account for the particular sensitivities and challenges of child sexual abuse memories, while confronting the complexities of archiving personal trauma and abuse. It will navigate the ethical, legal, and interpersonal challenges of accessioning, cataloguing, and providing access to archives across national contexts and be adaptable to other archives relating to sexual and gendered violence and struggles against injustice. It will be of use to archival practitioners in local and national institutions who may hold (or may be approached to hold) archives of child sexual abuse. Activists or allies will have a roadmap for managing their own collections or the archives left by their family, friends or co-activists. Find out more at the project website: www.remembering-together.uk [Will launch on 9th March].
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