Anger is a Gift: Notes on Confrontation and Survivor Power

I have not done any Victorious Voices work for the past week as the trial against my perpetrator fast approaches – one week away after a five-year wait. I did not have anything to write, so I spent the day looking through my notes and found something I wrote last year on the back of the Victorious Voices report on the University of Glasgow. When this was released, I had an interesting conversation with a friend who thought the report was “too confrontational” in tone to be taken seriously by the university.

My work through this project is often confrontational by design. It is not public relations. It is documentation. A record for the historical archive, and a statement from CSA survivors that says plainly: we are calling out the bullshit.

The confrontational tone matters because of the nature of the subject. If the seriousness of child sexual abuse is to be taken seriously at all, survivors cannot speak in softened language designed to reassure institutions. We must speak in the language of experience: direct, unflinching, and uncompromising.

In advocacy work, “too confrontational” is often a polite translation for something else:

‘We would prefer this truth to be softened so it fits more comfortably within the system as it currently exists.’

But the purpose of survivor testimony is not to make the system comfortable. It is to reveal how comfort has repeatedly been prioritised over survivor truth. There is an unavoidable trade-off here. As my friend pointed out, a confrontational tone can make the work easier for institutions to dismiss. But it also preserves something that is far more important: an honest record of how things stand today.

At its core, this is a clash of lenses.

From the institutional lens, reputational risk is seen as damage caused by what is said about the institution. When avoidance, silencing, or hypocrisy are named, the person speaking becomes the risk. Survivors are framed as the reputational threat.

From the survivor lens, reputational risk means something vastly different. The real risk lies in silence. Euphemism, avoidance, and institutional discomfort are not neutral forces, they help sustain the very culture that allows abuse to occur in the first place.

When survivors name these dynamics directly, institutions often react by trying to erase or silence the source of discomfort. The survivor becomes the problem that must be managed to avoid disruption. But from my perspective, the real risk is not that institutions might look bad. The real risk is that child sexual abuse continues to be erased from public discourse. And when something is erased from public discourse, it becomes easier for it to continue.

This is why the report last year was explicitly framed as a “survivor-led account.” The confrontation is not really about tone. It is about reframing power. For decades, institutions have controlled the narrative through public relations language, legal caution, and bureaucratic distance. Survivors are expected to moderate their voices so that institutions and local authorities remain comfortable with their failures. Directness disrupts that arrangement. By speaking plainly, survivors reclaim a small piece of narrative power.

The frame shifts from:

“Survivors speaking out puts our reputation at risk.”

to

“Your refusal to confront child sexual abuse is what puts your reputation at risk.”

This reversal matters deeply. Yes, a confrontational report may be easier for institutions to dismiss in the short term. But it preserves something that matters far more in the long term: the historical record. Movements rarely begin with language that institutions find comfortable. They begin with voices that refuse to play a broken game any longer.

The movement for CSA visibility is still in its infancy. Because of that, I see this work less as a tool for immediate reform and more as a record of truth, an archive that captures what this moment looks like from the survivor side of the story.

Anger, contrary to how survivors are often conditioned to see it, is not a failure of restraint. Anger is information. And sometimes, anger is a gift.