Remembering Together: Co-creating a 'Living Archive' Toolkit for Child Sexual Abuse Activism, 1960-2024

Remembering Together will innovate participatory approaches and collaborative methods for archiving child sexual abuse (CSA) survivor campaigning and activism in England, 1960-2024. Potential archives include the records of grassroots collectives and charities, alongside the papers, oral histories, and creative outputs of survivors. The project will define the logistics, considerations, and ethical conditions for survivor-centred ‘living archives,’ focusing on agency and consent, to open up new opportunities for multi-vocal histories of sexual violence. Survivors’ campaigning was (and remains) often transient and poorly funded, leaving no major archival deposits to date. Ephemeral remains can be found in the archives of larger campaigning and feminist organisations, but no single access point is available. Many records remain in private hands, in sheds and on USB sticks. As activists age or pass away, there is risk of irreparable loss. Archives are also routinely destroyed when organisations, under increasing financial pressure, close. Without these records, the role that survivor-activists played in changing responses to CSA across the last sixty years are obscured. Dominant political and media narratives are perpetuated at the expense of 'experts by experience' whose persistent activism has been marginalised and undervalued. However, the creation and preservation of survivor-centred archives raises fundamental research questions: What trauma-informed frameworks are needed to integrate survivors’ diverse experiences, interests, and needs? How can inclusion, authenticity, and intersectionality be enacted? How will issues of confidentiality, consent, and cultural sensitivity be encoded and sustained? Remembering Together explores these questions, in collaboration with current survivor-activists and organisations, to produce an archiving toolkit, with detailed protocols and instructions, to be used by survivors, archivists and researchers to support archival creation, preservation and discovery. Pilot studies using survivor-activist archives and oral histories will test and refine the toolkit’s content, producing models to inform future practice. A national discovery exercise to identify extant and lost survivor-activist archives will create an open access database that will map the extent of campaigning for the first time and resource new pathways for historical research. The project will produce critical outcomes: Survivor-activists and organisations will be equipped with the tools to preserve archival legacies. Current campaigns for CSA prevention and justice will mobilise learning from the work of predecessors, strengthening future action. Policymakers will be informed of the long history of survivor activism, and how survivor’s voices have shaped past interventions. Insights from historic activism will be integrated into current social justice processes, including the delivery of Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (CSRP) recommendations; and the delivery of the Church of England National Redress Scheme (NRS). Archivists, who are uncertain of legal/ethical implications surrounding CSA archives, will feel more empowered to accession and provide access to them. Researchers will discover CSA archives, stimulating new historical research on twentieth century CSA (and sexual violence more broadly), grassroots activism and feminist movements. Public audiences will learn about survivor-activists’ legacies for the first time. Remembering Together constructs essential foundations for a long-term research agenda, leading to an international and multi-partner project on CSA archives by the project team, that will embed outcomes in the long term. The archiving toolkit, with its protocols, mapping database and pilot studies, generates a cascade of scholarly interventions, enabling survivors’ voices, experiences, and actions to shape and inform emerging histories of CSA in familial, institutional, and religious settings.