A co-created film and quilt, made with young survivors of sexual violence, are now the centrepiece of a campaign to reshape how professionals understand and respond to these young people. The problem is a deep mismatch. Safeguarding systems—education, child welfare, criminal justice—often interpret a young person’s resistance to rules or expectations as defiance or pathology. Yet the young people themselves see their resistance as an expression of strength, agency, and self-protection. The original Imagining Resistance project used creative visual methods to help them articulate this gap, producing a film and a protest-inspired quilt that capture their lived understanding. Additional funding would take these outputs directly to the people who need them: social workers, youth workers, police, and therapists. Through public screenings, tailored workshops, and a co-designed card deck for use in services, the team aims to shift professional discourse and practice. If successful, this work could change how young survivors are heard and helped—not as rule-breakers to be managed, but as people exercising agency in the face of harm.
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Young people experiencing sexual violence and exploitation remain maligned for their resistance to social norms and expectations set through education, child welfare, and criminal justice frameworks. Whilst the safeguarding system continues to adapt to the forms of abuse young people experience, the approaches to intervening or offering help remain unaligned with the narratives young people develop to make sense of their own experiences. The Imagining Resistance project set out to address this disjuncture, developing new knowledge related to young people's understanding of resistance and its potential for conceptually reframing their experiences of sexual violence and safeguarding responses and recovery. Through the use of creative visual methods, young people were able to access a theoretically complex, abstract concept they described as helpful in reframing their experiences to foreground their own strength, agency, power, and hopefulness. The project's use of creative methods evolved over time, and a sensitivity to the participatory process enabled us to experiment with arts methods. Project findings evidence how understanding their own resistance enabled young people to feel weightless, free, powerful, agentic, defiant, self-protective, kind, and fun. Project outputs embodied the ethical, participatory ethos we sought to maintain throughout the project and we ended the project having co-constructed a meaningful and accessible approach to conceptualising resistance with young people. The 8-minute co-created film completed at the end of the Imagining Resistance project captures the feeling of the workshop spaces, and creates new ways of engaging with resistance both conceptually and practically, as it applies to young people affected by abuse and violence. The project developed multiple outputs, including the film and co-designed project quilt (inspired by historical protest movements and images), which represent the unexpected and responsive process we took alongside young people throughout the project. We could not have anticipated the shape these outputs took until we ended, and so could not plan for further engagement with young people, professionals, and participatory arts practitioners. Yet we believe these outputs are key tools to communicate the value and necessity of project findings for the purpose of shaping, challenging, and influencing more effective practice with young survivors of sexual violence and exploitation. Additional funding for impact would enable us to engage crucial (non-academic) stakeholder groups including young people and the interdisciplinary professionals who work with them, alongside creative arts practitioners through four key activities: 1) a series of public film screenings, 2) tailored workshops with each stakeholder group, 3) the creation of a set of resources, packaged in the form of a card deck that will be tested with each stakeholder group for use with young people receiving services for sexual violence and/or exploitation, and 4) a one-day event where we will engage participants who have trialled our card deck to share learning alongside consolidating and evidencing the project's impact. These activities will enable us to evidence the value of the original Imagining Resistance project, ensuring the innovative findings reach a wide audience that can apply learning to shape discourse and practice with young people.
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