The Maggie Oliver Foundation Ball 2026

Last night, I had the privilege of attending The Maggie Oliver Foundation Annual Ball at the Radisson Blu in Manchester, thanks to a kind invitation from Maggie Oliver herself. It was a night that served as a reminder as to why this work matters, not in a slogan-heavy, public-facing, “awareness raising” kind of way. But in the real, human, tangible sense of looking around a room and seeing people who have chosen to care. People from different walks of life, different professions, and different backgrounds, all brought together by a shared sense of purpose, compassion, anger, determination, and hope.

Maggie has been a huge champion of Victorious Voices, and the foundation has played a pivotal role in my own journey through the Criminal Justice System. But more than that, Maggie has amplified the voices and experiences of hundreds of survivors. Her own journey began at a time when almost nobody was willing to listen. When institutional silence was the norm. When speaking out did not bring applause, support, or public recognition, but risk, backlash, isolation, and personal cost. Maggie also took the hard road by refusing to rely on funders who would try to restrict her message, and that matters hugely.

In the world of CSA advocacy, independence is not just a practical position. It is a moral one. To be independent in this space is to be free enough to tell the truth without waiting for permission. It means not having to soften the language because a funder, institution, agency, or department might feel uncomfortable. It means not having to package survivor pain into something more palatable. It means refusing to reduce lived experience to a case study, a statistic, or a neatly framed “voice” that can be included in a report and then quietly ignored.

Independence allows survivors and survivor-led projects to retain something that is too often taken from us: control. Control over our stories. Control over our images. Control over the language used to describe us. Control over the tone, the pace, the boundaries, and the direction of the work. So much of the experience of child sexual abuse is rooted in powerlessness. The original harm is not only the act itself, but the aftermath. The theft of agency, the confusion, the years of trying to make sense of something that is beyond words.  Then, too often, survivors enter systems that reproduce the same dynamics in different forms. We are processed, assessed, delayed, questioned, managed, mishandled, and often retraumatised by the very structures that claim to exist for justice, protection, or support.

This is why independent CSA work matters so deeply. It does not mean rejecting every institution or refusing all collaboration. It means entering those spaces without becoming owned by them. It means working with people, organisations, funders, academics, services, journalists, and public bodies where there is alignment, but not surrendering the core of the work to them. For there is a big difference between partnership and capture.

Survivor-led work must be careful of capture. It can look like being invited into rooms but not being given power. It can look like being praised publicly while being ignored privately. It can look like institutions using survivor voices to demonstrate progress while resisting the bigger changes those voices are asking for. It can look like endless meetings, consultations, panels, and listening exercises that absorb survivor energy without transferring meaningful authority, money, or decision-making power.

Independence is the shield against that, and it is why nights like last night are important. This road is incredibly rocky. There are times of darkness, exhaustion, disillusionment, and extreme challenge. Anyone who has done serious work in this field knows that it asks something of you. It pulls from the deepest parts of your own history, and it forces you to keep returning to material most people would rather avoid. It means standing in public with truths that many still find easier to look away from. There are days when the weight of it feels impossible. There are days when you wonder how much more survivors are expected to give before society finally understands the scale of what has been hidden, minimised, excused, mishandled, and ignored.

But then there are nights like last night that are full of joy, laughter, and love. There was great conversation and great music, all tied together by shared purpose and people power. In this work, joy is not a distraction from the seriousness of the issue. Joy is part of the resistance. Celebration is part of survival. Community is part of repair. When survivors, advocates, allies, families, professionals, and supporters gather in a room not only to mourn what has happened, but to honour what has been built in response, something powerful happens.

The story shifts because it is no longer only about harm. The story is now one of will, determination, imagination, and strength. This is the power of independent work. It can move with the urgency of lived experience. It can respond to reality rather than policy cycles. It can speak in human language rather than institutional language. It can hold pain and beauty at the same time. It can build trust because it is not pretending to be detached from the issue. It is rooted in it.

For Victorious Voices, this has always been central. The project is not about speaking for survivors. It is about creating a space where survivors can be seen and heard on their own terms. It is about portraiture, testimony, dignity, visibility, and reclamation. It is about refusing the old cultural image of the survivor as broken, voiceless, ruined, or defined only by what was done to us. And perhaps most importantly, it says that survivors do not need to wait for institutions to decide that our experiences are worthy of attention.

Maggie’s own journey shows what can happen when someone refuses to be quiet and refuses to turn a blind eye. She has shown that one person’s refusal can become a movement. One voice can become a platform for many. One act of conscience can create a foundation that supports others to stand, speak, heal, and be believed. But voice is not enough if nobody acts, and awareness is not enough if nothing changes, which is why independence matters. It allows the work to keep asking harder questions. Who benefits from silence? Who is protected by delay? Who gets resourced? Who gets platformed? Who is asked to relive their trauma for free while institutions receive funding to discuss it? Who is invited into the room, and who is actually allowed to shape what happens there?

These questions matter because CSA is not only a personal issue. It is cultural. It is institutional. It is political. It is historical. It lives in families, schools, churches, care systems, police processes, courts, media narratives, and community denial. To confront it properly, we need more than sympathy, and last night showed what is possible when we transform pain into power. It showed what can happen when we hear from people who were never supposed to be heard, but are choosing to speak anyway.

It felt like others are finally choosing to listen and see the power of what can be achieved when survivors, advocates, and allies choose to stand together, tell the truth, and build something that silence cannot stop or destroy.