Structural Inevitability: What the CJS Does to CSA Survivors

This Easter Sunday, I’m reflecting on the past month and where things now stand after a terrible March. This week, we’ve applied for a Section 28 pre-recorded cross-examination to take place this year instead of May 2028. My case was seen by the UK Victims' Commissioner and escalated to the Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor for the Northwest to assess whether anything can be done to move it forward and to understand what immediate steps can be taken to support me. The most obvious one would have been for the trial to go ahead as planned after two years of waiting.

The past week has been something familiar now, my body and mind slowly stepping out of trauma activation, returning to something that resembles normality. And once again, I’m left facing the same realisation: this system is completely ignorant of trauma. It operates on the assumption that these events happened years ago, and therefore their impact is negligible. As if trauma is something that fades neatly with time, as if the body keeps a calendar. It doesn’t. Trauma is not linear. It is not historical. It is present. It lives in the nervous system, in the body, in the unconscious. And processes like this, court cases, delays, uncertainty, don’t resolve it. They reactivate it repeatedly.

What I experienced this past month was not a setback. It was not a personal failure. It was an expected response to an environment that is, by its very nature, destabilising. We’ve all been conditioned by a certain kind of storytelling, particularly the Hollywood version of trauma. The idea that suffering leads to growth. That endurance leads to a clean, redemptive ending. That once the final chapter is written, everything will finally make sense. It’s a comforting narrative, but it’s also false.

This is not a character-building arc; this is not how the psyche and nervous system work. There is no neat resolution waiting at the end of this process. What this actually looks like is far less palatable: prolonged stress, instability, exhaustion, and repeated collapse followed by partial recovery. I used to believe in the idea that it “made me stronger.” It helped me survive, and it gave meaning to something that otherwise felt senseless. But looking at it clearly now, I don’t believe that anymore. If none of this had happened, I would have been stronger from the start. Stronger because I wouldn’t have spent years in survival mode. Stronger because I wouldn’t have had to fight for baseline stability. Stronger because my energy would have long ago been directed toward building a life, not holding one together. What this experience did was not build strength; it consumed it when there was none to consume. It forced me to use the little strength I already had on things most people never have to think about: managing anxiety, completing basic tasks, holding onto a sense of self through the fog of dissociation.

None of this journey has made me stronger. It has denied me opportunities to the point that I have to create my own. It gave me a kill switch that can lead to crippling anxiety and executive dysfunction, where the most basic tasks can feel like a huge challenge. Not to mention the shame. So much shame. None of this is helping me with anything; it’s all obstacles to a happy and accomplished life. None of this is a gift. None of this is growth. It is the weight of something that should never have happened, compounded by a Criminal Justice System that struggles to respond to it properly.

So, when I look back at March, at the drop in productivity, the emotional regression, the sense of things slipping, the sweet temptation of self-abandonment, I’m no longer framing it as a failure. It was a structural inevitability. I am living through an extreme legal process tied to childhood trauma, where I am both the witness and the injured party. That alone creates a level of pressure most people will never experience. It's not my weakness that caused the dip; it's the reality that the system demands superhuman endurance from people it already failed once. It demands clarity while creating confusion. It demands resilience while generating instability. It requires people to perform under conditions that would destabilise anyone. I have to remember that this dip shows how alive I am. I know that many people facing this level of stress would shut down completely: dissociate, detach, numb themselves.

I feel everything, which vividly shows that I’m refusing to dissociate. That’s painful, yes, but it’s also powerful. It means I am still present and still connected to myself, which blocks the ultimate theft from trauma: the loss of self and agency. A friend told me this week that one thing that impresses her about my writing is the clarity from within the storm. This capacity to articulate doesn’t come from nowhere. I have reached this stage because, after years of experience, I now know these moments are not the end. I can recognise that these collapses, as destabilising as they feel, are not permanent states.

If all of the above wasn’t enough pressure, my court case is running parallel to life, and my leadership in Victorious Voices. Both require endurance, truth-telling, and the willingness to be seen in vulnerable, high-risk spaces. The toll of all of this is very real because it is not easy in this modern world to stand in truth with no mask, no protection, and no easy escape hatch. It can be exhausting. With this growth comes the reality that your window of tolerance is constantly blown apart. It means certain dips have to be viewed not as a derailment, but as a pause for recalibration. These dips no longer erase progress or wipe out my vision. Once the clouds pass, I remember that I am not broken and I am not behind. It is the system I have trapped myself in that is broken, along with a culture that does not want to acknowledge these problems, let alone fix them.