Victims & Survivors
This section of the Inquiry website is specifically for victims and survivors. You have a voice and you deserve to be heard.
Your voice is also vital to our work. We want to hear from you if an organisation failed to protect you from abuse, or failed to respond appropriately to allegations (find out more about what we mean by 'an organisation' in About Truth Project). Once we understand what happened in the past, we can take steps to better protect children from sexual abuse in the future.
The Truth Project
The Inquiry's Truth Project gives us an opportunity for you to share your experience and views with the Inquiry in a safe and confidential way.
By encouraging victims and survivors to come forward we hope to better understand the scale, breadth and nature of child sexual abuse, in an effort to help stop it happening in the future.
Experiences Shared
These are some of the experiences of child sexual abuse shared with the Truth Project. All names and identifying details have been changed.
The Forum
The Victims & Survivors Forum is open to all victims and survivors of child sexual abuse. It was set up to make it easier for victims and survivors to engage with us, ask questions and make suggestions about how we work.
Safe and secure
Everyone working for this Inquiry wants to make children safer. We also want to support you by giving you a safe place where you can speak freely about how you were failed as a child.
When you contact us, you can be confident that you'll be listened to with compassion and not judged. Your private information will be treated with the highest levels of security and sensitivity if you do decide to get in touch. Just fill in the three short questions and we can arrange to get in touch however suits you best.
Confidentiality
The Inquiry will keep your information confidential at all times and we have a legal ruling in force (called a Restriction Order) to enable us to do this. The only exceptions to this would be if the Inquiry needs to pass any information to the police or other relevant authorities, or where otherwise required by law.
The Inquiry must pass on all allegations of child abuse to the police. We will pass on your contact details to the police if you agree for us to do so. However, we may have to pass on your details without your agreement to the police or other relevant authorities if we believe there is a child protection concern or someone is at risk of serious harm.
At the close of the Inquiry, all the personal information you provide us will be securely destroyed.
Why share your experience?
When children go to an organisation such as a school or a church, or if they attend a club, or even stay at a detention centre, we should be confident that they'll be safe. If a child tells someone in authority – such as a social worker, teacher or police officer – that they have been abused at home, we should be confident that this will be acted on and the child protected.
This Inquiry wants to find out why this didn’t happen for so many children in the past. We want to understand how and why children were failed and we want to make strong recommendations on how they can be better protected in the future.
We need to learn from your experience. You can help us understand how to keep children safe. Your voice is central to our Inquiry and your insights can help guide us forward to finding a better way to protect children.
By sharing your experience and your opinions, you can make a difference to the lives of future generations and have a positive impact in changes to child protection policies.
Victims & Survivors Consultative Panel
The Victims and Survivors' Consultative Panel is a key part of the Inquiry. Its role is to provide consultative advice on: communications, engagement, research, child sexual abuse evidence, direction of workstreams and future recommendations. The Panel members are appointed in their individual capacity as self-identified victims and survivors whose experience, knowledge and abilities provide insight and expertise to the Inquiry. They work to ensure that the needs and perspectives of victims and survivors are reflected in the Inquiry’s on-going work. The Panel members have all spent many years supporting adult survivors of child sexual abuse and striving for survivors to be heard.