CSA as a Political Football

It has been an interesting week to say the least in British politics, and things are going to be heating up heading into the Makerfield by-election. There is a danger now that childhood sexual abuse is becoming one of the central political battlegrounds in Britain, not because survivors have finally been given meaningful recognition, but because the subject has become useful. For years, CSA has existed in public life as something Britain claims to care about but rarely wants to understand. It is invoked during scandals, inquiries, sentencing debates, political rows and media storms. Then it disappears again into reports, safeguarding language, charity statements, criminal justice jargon and closed-door sector events. Survivors are asked to provide testimony, pain, credibility and emotional force. But when policy is shaped, when priorities are set, when justice conferences are convened, when institutions decide what the public conversation should sound like, survivors are still too often absent.

In recent years, the political energy around grooming gangs, institutional failure and child sexual exploitation has intensified. The government has failed to implement recommendations linked to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Reform UK has also placed grooming gangs at the centre of its political messaging. This will come to the forefront as Andy Burnham runs for office with his role in commissioning reports on Operation Augusta, Rochdale, Oldham and wider failures in Greater Manchester. The issue is not that these failures should be kept out of politics. They are political. When police forces fail children, that is political. When local authorities ignore warnings, that is political. When victims are disbelieved, criminalised, delayed, retraumatised or abandoned, that is political. When sentencing fails to reflect the severity of what has happened, that is political. When survivors are forced to wait years for trials, only for hearings to collapse, be vacated, or be pushed far into the future, that is political.

The problem is not that CSA has entered politics. The problem is that it is entering politics without survivors at the centre, and that distinction matters. Once child sexual abuse becomes a political football, the victims often disappear. The subject becomes a weapon passed between factions. One side uses it to accuse the other of cowardice, hypocrisy or cover-up. Another side retreats into defensiveness, procedural language or carefully managed concern. Institutions rush to protect their own reputations. Charities and services stay cautious, careful not to alienate commissioners, funders, policy contacts or political allies. The media looks for heat. Politicians look for advantage, and CSA Survivors are left watching their own lives become ammunition.

That is why it can be so revealing when the phrase “grooming gangs” is spoken in professional or sector spaces with a hint of disdain. Some people hear the phrase and immediately think of far-right exploitation, racist narratives, media sensationalism or bad-faith actors. Those dangers are real. But there is another danger too: that fear of the wrong people using the issue becomes a reason for the right people to avoid it. And when that happens, survivors lose again. The correct response to political exploitation is not silence. It is accuracy, courage and survivor leadership. Britain cannot afford a public culture where child sexual abuse is only spoken about loudly by those seeking political gain, and only spoken about cautiously by those with professional responsibility. It allows institutional failures to become tribal talking points rather than lived consequences. It allows survivors to be used symbolically while remaining practically excluded.

Projects like Victorious Voices matter because we carve out a lane that does not depend on permission from political parties, traditional survivor-sector gatekeepers, criminal justice institutions or cautious professional networks. We create space for survivors to exist as full human beings: photographers, writers, teachers, lawyers, academics, business owners, parents, artists, campaigners, leaders. Not case studies or ideological props.

The dominant public image of the CSA survivor is still narrow. Survivors are expected to appear either broken enough to generate sympathy or healed enough to reassure everyone that the system, eventually, works. There is very little room for anger, contradiction, critique, ambition, professional expertise or power. There is even less room for survivors who say: We do not simply want services. We want cultural change. We want justice. We want visibility. We want institutional accountability. We want to shape the conversation ourselves. Yet we are the people missing from many of the rooms where CSA policy and justice are discussed. That absence becomes especially glaring when conferences and sector events are convened to discuss the role of the third sector in the criminal justice system. Catch22’s 2026 Justice Conference, for example, was framed around the role of the third sector in the justice system and brought together leaders, practitioners, commissioners, partners and people with lived experience. The question remains: who gets invited, who is seen as credible, and which forms of lived experience are allowed to influence the agenda?

Many survivors in Victorious Voices have been through the criminal justice system. We know what it is to report and to wait, and wait, for years.  We know what it is to be interviewed and hand over private pain to state institutions. To be cross-examined. To learn that “justice” is often less a process of repair than a second terrain of endurance. Yet our voices are still missing from justice-sector conversations, and that should trouble people. For survivors, these are not abstract policy failures. A delayed trial is not simply a scheduling issue. A missed email is not simply poor administration. A cancelled hearing is not just a diary problem. These moments shape sleep, work, relationships, trust, health and the ability to rebuild a life. Institutions often describe these failures in procedural language because procedure protects them from the emotional reality of the harm they have caused.

And if the people most harmed by the system are not shaping the discussion about the system, then the discussion is incomplete at best and illegitimate at worst. Lawyers, academics, service providers, police, commissioners, therapists, researchers and policymakers all have roles to play. But none of them should become substitutes for survivor authority. Too often, survivors are treated as raw material: useful for testimony, useful for emotional impact, useful for launch events, useful for reports, useful for funding bids. But when it comes to interpretation, strategy and power, the ‘professionals’ step back in. This is a pattern that has to be broken. The coming political fight over CSA will test whether Britain has learned anything at all. The rise of Reform has already pushed grooming gangs and child sexual abuse sentencing further into mainstream political discourse. Labour, Conservatives, local leaders, campaigners and media outlets will all be forced to respond. It can be predicted that some will do so sincerely. Some will do so defensively. Some will do so opportunistically.

CSA is not merely a criminal justice issue. It is a cultural issue. It is a political issue. It is an institutional issue. It is a public memory issue. It is about whose pain is believed, whose bodies are protected, whose testimony is inconvenient, and whose suffering becomes acceptable collateral damage in the maintenance of reputation. But even now, the discussion often becomes trapped between denial and weaponisation. On one side, some minimise or deflect because they are frightened of where the conversation might lead. On the other side, some exploit the pain of survivors to advance broader political projects that may have little real interest in survivor welfare, and both responses fail survivors.

Victorious Voices, and projects like it, do something the formal sector often struggles to do: they restore image, voice and agency at the same time. A portrait is not a policy paper. A testimony is not a consultation brief. But together they create a form of public evidence that cannot be easily dismissed. They insist that survivors are not abstractions. We have faces. We have names. We have lives beyond what we have experienced. We also have insight and analysis. We are not just witnesses to harm. We are analysts of systems, and we understand more than anyone that delay is not an administrative inconvenience but a form of psychological attrition. We understand poor communication not as a service failure but as a reenactment of powerlessness. We understand we have primary expertise, not ‘lived experience’.

If survivors are central, the conversation becomes more honest. It becomes harder to hide behind euphemism. It becomes harder to exploit the issue without accountability. It becomes harder for institutions to claim progress while excluding those most affected. It becomes harder for politicians to turn abuse into theatre. It becomes harder for the sector to speak in polished language while avoiding the deeper failures. If survivors are used, then we will see more of the same: inquiries, outrage, speeches, conferences, funding bids, headlines, apologies, defensive statements, and carefully framed concern. The machinery will keep moving, and the fundamental imbalance will remain. CSA is in danger of becoming a political football. But it does not have to be the case. It can become something else: a reckoning, a reordering, a transfer of authority. The survivor voice is not an accessory to this conversation.

It is the conversation.