Language, Liability, and the Politics of CSA Survivorship

The landscape of child sexual abuse (CSA) survivorship is undoubtedly shifting. Survivors are speaking more openly in increasing numbers, public awareness is rising, and cultural silence is fracturing. CSA must be understood not only as historical abuse inflicted on individuals, but as a systemic failure and a hidden cultural problem.

Systems are protected through institutional gatekeeping. It is this gatekeeping that shapes which survivor stories are platformed, how they are framed, who receives funding, and which narratives are legitimised.

This is also how cultural erasure persists, not through overt denial, but through narrative management.

We are living in a moment where survivors are talking and the public is listening. Yet institutions still control the microphone. Stories are often filtered into forms that are clinical, compliant, and administratively legible. Survivors who fit the “recovered,” policy-aligned framework are easier to platform. Those who insist on naming perpetrators, institutional failures, or systemic complicity will encounter heavy resistance.

This is not accidental; it is structural and one of the most vulnerable points in that structure is narrative control. Victorious Voices and the testimonies we produce directly wrestles with this narrative monopoly because we don’t ask permission and we don’t sanitise our experiences. This is why the work is genuinely powerful, and disruptive.

One of the most significant shifts in recent years is linguistic. Increasingly, services and institutions are using the term “sexual harms” in place of “sexual abuse.”

At first glance, this appears neutral and trauma-informed. It is descriptive, preventative, system-friendly. But language does not simply describe reality, it organises power.

“Sexual abuse” is morally charged. It implies agency, wrongdoing, and accountability. It raises the central question: Who is responsible?

“Sexual harms,” by contrast, reframes the issue around impact and mitigation. The central questions become what went wrong? How do we reduce risk? What safeguards can we improve?

From an institutional perspective, this shift is efficient. “Abuse” can trigger police involvement, legal exposure, media scrutiny, and reputational risk. “Harms” fits more comfortably within safeguarding panels and policy frameworks. Abuse creates crisis whilst Harms create cases.

This is not to suggest malicious intent in every instance. Many professionals use contemporary terminology in good faith. But in a legal and regulatory environment where knowledge plus inaction equals liability, language evolves defensively. “Sexual harms” allows institutions to signal trauma-awareness without conceding negligence, complicity, or systemic failure. It absorbs outrage. It lowers the moral temperature and redistributes focus from responsibility to response.

Another reality in the changing landscape is the structural tension between advocacy and partnership. Organisations that rely on police forces, local authorities, or statutory bodies as stakeholders inevitably operate within constraints. This does not invalidate their work; many services provide vital support that enables survivors to stabilise and rebuild their lives. But it does create a tension between standing beside survivors and holding power to account.

Movements that seek systemic accountability cannot operate solely within the frameworks of the systems they critique. If we want to shift culture, we must also penetrate the public sphere beyond the “CSA bubble.” Power must see itself reflected in the work, not only in therapeutic spaces, but in cultural, civic, and political arenas.

Institutional silence can become strategic leverage. The question is not only why certain work is platformed, but why other work is avoided. When that avoidance is clear we must ask why it occurs and what is it protecting?

The most important shift occurring is internal. Survivors are often taught that authority is earned through external validation: qualifications, funding, institutional endorsement, follower counts. But in creative, cultural, and activist spaces, authority is not granted. It is declared. It is the difference between saying, “I hope to be a voice in this space,” and “I am shaping this conversation.”

The ethos behind projects like Victorious Voices is not to seek permission to speak, nor to sanitise testimony into policy-compliant language. It is to present survivors in the fullness of their humanity, not as service users, not as case studies, not as administratively contained stories, but as complex individuals who refuse narrative reduction and cultural erasure.

There are emerging survivor-led initiatives operating outside traditional frameworks, building new funding models, new cultural platforms, and new forms of collective agency. This signals a broader shift: survivorship is moving from managed disclosure to cultural authorship.

For survivors, the challenge is to see the unfolding terrain clearly. Personal history matters. Healing matters. Support services matter. But alongside that, it is essential to understand the structural environment in which narratives are shaped. Language, funding, partnerships, and platforming are not neutral. They are sites of power and when survivors recognise this, the balance shifts.

We must reclaim our own power because the most disruptive act in any controlled system is narrative sovereignty, the refusal to let your story be administratively contained.