Trauma and the Reconstruction of Meaning for CSA Survivors
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Birmingham for the sentencing hearing of the perpetrator of a Victorious Voices member. They have not yet shared their journey publicly yet, but it is one that took over twenty years, and an extraordinary level of strength, resilience, and faith, to reach justice. Before meeting them, I spent twenty minutes alone in Birmingham Cathedral, the Church of St Philip. I sat quietly and held three things in mind: the day ahead, a close family member who was seriously unwell in hospital, and my own ongoing journey.
This has become a ritual I do in every city my work with Victorious Voices has taken me, I have spent time in a cathedral. So far: Manchester, York, Newcastle, Hull, Bristol, Coventry, Gloucester, and now Birmingham. I am not a particularly religious person, so the question is an obvious one: why do this? The answer is not belief in God, but belief in meaning. Faith does not have to be religious. Sometimes it is simply the decision to move through the world guided by purpose rather than fear, presence rather than dissociation. For me, these quiet moments before difficult days are about grounding myself before stepping back into systems that so often fail survivors.
There is also a deeper, symbolic layer to Victorious Voices. The easy option would have been to collect as many CSA survivor stories as possible and share them online. The harder option, and the one that feels most ethically sound, is to meet people face to face, to take a portrait that holds each person in dignity, strength, and power, and to bring those individual stories together into a collective force.
It is easy to be faithless in the world we are living in. Faithlessness can look like cynicism, withdrawal, or self-erasure. There is a line in a song by the band Faithless that has stayed with me ever since I first heard it 20+ years ago: “Decisions based upon faith and not fear, people who live right now and right here.” It sounds simple, almost throwaway, but it captures something fundamental. Recovery from childhood sexual abuse depends on that same shift, learning to see oneself from a position of self-love rather than self-loathing, presence rather than shame.
It’s also important to realise that trauma is not only inflicted on a person through childhood sexual abuse. Trauma, of course, is not limited to abuse itself. The defining characteristic of a traumatic event is its capacity to induce helplessness and terror. Such experiences alter physiological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory, often severing these normally integrated functions from one another. Survivors of prolonged abuse frequently experience deep distortions in identity and self-esteem, alongside enduring difficulties with trust and relationships. A person trapped in an abusive environment faces impossible tasks of adaptation. They must find ways to preserve trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in situations that are unsafe, control where there is none, and power in the face of total helplessness. What do those words evoke in you?
In this context, faith is not abstract, it is practical. It is the slow, often painful work of choosing meaning over annihilation, dignity over disappearance, and connection over isolation. When I sit in a cathedral before meeting a survivor, before a court hearing, or before a difficult day, I am not praying in the traditional sense. I am reminding myself that what we are building is grounded in presence, intention, and respect. That even in the aftermath of profound harm, it is still possible to stand, to be seen, and to belong.
If you compare this description of trauma to what we witness online daily in Gaza, Ukraine, and increasingly in the United States against its own citizens, it becomes clear that the infliction of trauma is not incidental. It is a powerful mechanism for neutralising collective power. Trauma fragments attention, erodes trust, and pushes people toward survival rather than solidarity.
Think of everything we have endured over the past five years, the COVID pandemic, followed by the so-called “cost of living” crisis and the slow erosion of public institutions once assumed to offer stability or protection. It has been a relentless period of pressure, one in which it would be easy for anyone to lose faith. For me, this has unfolded alongside direct engagement with a criminal justice system that is deeply flawed and, in many cases, actively re-traumatising. The cumulative effect of all these things matters.
Those who endure sexual abuse in childhood are particularly vulnerable to this kind of erosion because the groundwork is laid early. Many survivors internalise a belief that we are fundamentally without worth, an explanation our young minds devise to make sense of sustained maltreatment. That belief alone is enough to destroy faith and hope for many. Some bury the memories of abuse whilst others turn rage and despair inward. Many numb themselves to physical sensation, dissociate from their bodies, or self-destruct entirely. These are not moral failures; they are survival strategies formed in conditions of overwhelming powerlessness.
At this point, it is important to clarify what is meant by faith. Faith here should be understood broadly: religious belief, trust in other people, confidence in institutions, belief in justice, and faith in oneself. CSA causes a collapse of moral order, that the world is not as it claims to be. CSA introduces an early and profound contradiction:
Adults who are meant to protect harm instead.
Institutions that claim moral authority fail to intervene.
Rules about right and wrong are violated without consequence.
For many survivors, this produces a permanent destabilisation of moral coherence. The world no longer feels governed by fairness or logic, but by arbitrary power. Faith in an underlying moral structure, religious or secular, is replaced by vigilance, cynicism, or existential doubt. When abuse occurs within religious families, communities, or institutions, the injury becomes theological, God is perceived as absent, indifferent, or complicit. Even survivors who were not raised religiously often experience a metaphysical rupture: the loss of belief that anything larger than themselves is protective or benevolent.
One of the most enduring consequences of childhood sexual abuse, and one that increasingly characterises the wider social climate, is a shattered faith in authority and protection. Abuse teaches a devastating lesson early: authority does not equal safety. Survivors frequently generalise this learning across life, approaching teachers, police, therapists, clergy, and courts with suspicion. Help-seeking becomes dangerous rather than restorative. Disclosure feels futile, or actively harmful. This is why institutional betrayal, by schools, churches, social services, universities, and legal systems, so often re-traumatises survivors. It does not merely fail to repair the original wound; it confirms it.
Then there is the loss of faith in justice and accountability. Many survivors witness their abuser face no consequences, or are actively protected by family, institutions, or professional networks. This erodes belief in justice systems and social accountability. Over time, it produces a corrosive conclusion: that truth itself has no power. What follows is a deep disillusionment with legal, academic, and cultural processes that claim to arbitrate harm but routinely fail those most affected by it.
Childhood sexual abuse also profoundly alters faith in human connection through a distortion of love, meaning, and attachment. Love becomes entangled with fear, shame, or control. Intimacy can feel inherently unsafe. Attachment often oscillates between avoidance and desperate seeking. For many survivors, this results in the loss of faith that safe, reciprocal, non-exploitative connection is even possible.
Faith is also one of the primary ways human beings seek answers to existential and meaning-based questions, questions that CSA ruptures at an early and foundational level. Abuse leaves a child confronting unanswerable contradictions long before they have the cognitive or emotional tools to process them:
Why did this happen to me?
What kind of world allows this?
What does survival even mean?
Without space, validation, or cultural frameworks capable of holding these questions, many survivors abandon meaning altogether. They live pragmatically, numbly, or hyper-independently. Hope is not rejected out of pessimism, but out of self-protection.
And then comes what is often the final betrayal: cultural silencing. When survivors eventually speak about their abuse, they are frequently met with ignorance, discomfort, avoidance, or bureaucratic containment. The rupture completes itself when the implicit message becomes: even truth, spoken clearly with evidence, does not matter enough to change anything.
This is often the point at which faith collapses not only in systems, but in collective humanity itself. And that is a dangerous place to land, because when belief in shared responsibility and moral repair dissolves, the question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, is left?
When I confronted my perpetrator by text message in 2021, I included this line “I’ve become a person trying not to become bitter, knowing I could be so much further ahead in life if it hadn’t consisted of one obstacle after another to overcome.”
It was that growing bitterness that frightened me, because it was beginning to change who I was. Had I lost my faith entirely, it would not have been because I was weak, broken, or morally deficient. It would have been because it had been empirically disproven. What followed instead was the slow construction of a different belief system, one grounded not in inherited narratives, hollow authority, or promised protection, but in autonomy, clarity, and earned trust.
This form of faith does not promise protection. It does not guarantee justice. What it offers instead is orientation. A way of moving through the world without disappearing from oneself. A commitment to dignity, truth, and relational ethics, even in environments structured to undermine them. It is the belief that meaning can still be constructed deliberately, collectively, and with care, even after the moral order has been shattered.
I will expand on how this belief system was built, and what it has required in practice, in a future piece.
