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How can we center childhood sexual abuse survivor healing without relying on prisons? There aren’t any easy answers, but there are possibilities. Thirty-nine diasporic Black survivors, advocates, and one former bystander, courageously wrote about those possibilities in Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse.

Love WITH Accountability features compelling writings by child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Simmons’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. The silence around childhood sexual abuse in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political, and professional. There are approximately 42 million child sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. and millions of bystanders who look the other way as the abuse occurs and cover for the harm-doers with no accountability. Documentary filmmaker and survivor of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape, Aishah Shahidah Simmons invites diasporic Black people to join her in transformative storytelling that envisions a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on the criminal justice system. Simmons’ collection explores healing from and humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of child sexual abuse.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is an award-winning cultural worker who, for over 25-years, has examined the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. Her lived experiences as a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, a Black feminist lesbian, and a 20-year Buddhist practitioner committed to healing, accountability, and compassionate justice inform the creation of her work. She is the editor of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse(AK Press), and the producer/director of the 2006-groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded film, NO! The Rape Documentary. Aishah is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the 2022-2023 Changemakers Authors Cohort, a 2020 Soros Media Fellowship, a 2016-2019 Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship, and the 2019 Breakthrough U.S. Activist Impact Award. She has presented her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues across the United States and Canada and countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She is on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, @Afrolez.

Dr. Indira Henard has been with the DC Rape Crisis Center for the last fourteen years serving in different capacities, lending invaluable experience including leadership roles in fundraising, operations, cultivating relationships and strategic partnerships, as well as coalition building. Under Dr. Henard’s Executive leadership  she has not only repositioned the oldest rape crisis center in the country, but she has laid a strong foundation as the agency is celebrating 50 years of survivor centered, and community led services. Dr. Henard has worked nationally and internationally in helping organizations build capacity to respond to the needs of sexual violence in their communities.  Dr. Henard’s high level training and technical assistance provided to local nonprofits, and international NGO’s has resulted in the repositioning of the sexual assault coalition in the District of Columbia, partnering to help open the first rape crisis center in Lagos, Nigeria, as well as working with a coalition of international NGOs in developing a mobile app to aid refugee workers who are working with sexual assault victims. Most recently, Dr. Henard was selected to serve on the Independent Review Commission to address Sexual Assault in the military under the Office of the Secretary of Defense as ordered by President Biden.

alicia sanchez gill is a queer, Afrolatinx survivor and advocate with nearly twenty years of experience in intersectional anti-violence and harm-reduction work with organizations and collectives that center survivors who have often been left out of mainstream anti-violence movements. The belief that we will never end interpersonal and state gendered violence if we don’t end the carceral state is central to her approach. Her writing has been published and referenced in national media, academic journals, and a variety of digital outlets. alicia holds a masters of social work but other survivors have been her best teachers.