VICTORIOUS VOICES x SVAHRN

Coventry University, 2025

On 18th June 2025, the sixth Victorious Voices exhibition was presented at Coventry University’s Sexual Violence and Health Research Day: Healthcare, Healing and Hope. Hosted by the Sexual Violence and Health Research Network, the event brought survivors, researchers, healthcare professionals and advocates together to consider how knowledge about sexual violence can lead to better care.

Black-and-white portraits and first-person testimonies were displayed as part of the day’s programme. Their presence placed the people most affected by the subject alongside the research and professional discussions about it. Visitors could spend time with individual stories of childhood sexual abuse, survival and recovery, told in the words participants had chosen to share.

That relationship between research and lived experience was central to the exhibition. Evidence can reveal patterns, identify gaps in care and help shape better responses. Survivor testimony can show how those systems are experienced by the people who turn to them—and what dignity, choice and trust mean in practice. Victorious Voices asked attendees to hold both forms of knowledge together.

Lee Cooper also spoke about the project to an audience of around 130 people, sharing why it was created and the responsibilities involved in making survivor stories public. The talk extended the invitation made by the portraits: to see survivors as individuals with authority over their own stories, rather than as examples used to illustrate someone else’s work.

After the relocation of the inaugural exhibition at the University of Glasgow, Coventry was a significant experience for the project. The portraits and testimonies were welcomed within a programme explicitly concerned with survivor-led research and better care. The exhibition showed what an academic partnership can make possible when survivors’ voices are given space both on the walls and in the conversation.