Using serious joy to talk about and respond to childhood sexual violence

I am a trauma-informed researcher, designer, and founder of the UK non-profit Secrets Worth Sharing, a consultancy and survivor platform focusing on the intersections of childhood sexual abuse.

One of the things I do with Secrets Worth Sharing is showing people that it is possible to smile or laugh even while having a conversation about childhood sexual abuse. Our world is so uncomfortable with talking about childhood violence that we allow it to thrive in silence, oftentimes responding to it in a way that makes this abuse worse.

I once told a lady at a dinner table that I give people approachable advice on talking about childhood sexual abuse, and she nearly choked her food out at me in response.

If only she was willing to have that kind of conversation, we could have talked about what change looks like, and she might have gone home and talked to her friends about responsible parenting, consent, or the laws that need to change.

And how do we do that? We talk about childhood sexual abuse informally and lead to practical tips on ending it - a process that I call serious joy. This is a trauma-informed method that I designed. I’ll briefly show you what I mean by ‘serious joy’ using the theme of Zero.

First, for the serious bit. For us survivors in the room, Zero is a number we understand all too well. It might be the number of people we felt we could tell about our situation. It might be the number of times we thought this was happening to anyone else. And for many, it’s the number of support services we could see that accurately depicted our experiences that we felt we could trust.

Through our activism, our work, our connections, and advocacy, we have found ourselves in this room. Yet there are many others whose experiences are still discriminated against because of their location in the world, their race, the type of abuse they endured, or their position in the family. For them, Zero is still a number steeped in negativity.

But we can give Zero a new meaning. We show that although abuse thrives through secrets, these secrets are worth sharing. Soon, we will have a roadmap that imagines that it is possible to end childhood sexual abuse by confronting these secrets.

I encourage you to go a step further than Zero, to use joy. There’s a funny thing about the symbol for zero… when you open your hand you make the “OK” sign. In order to combat childhood sexual abuse, we need to be okay talking about it in spaces where we would normally do so.

Use humor - not at the abuse itself, but the ridiculous responses around it. And that way, you plant small seeds, little and often, that make childhood sexual abuse more approachable to talk about, and more practical to respond to. You bring the narrative to the people outside of your circle. You make space for people who are often left out of these conversations; forced migrants, gender non-conforming people, and incarcerated people, to name a few.

So be okay with intersectionality, okay with joy in these spaces, and talk about childhood sexual abuse outside of these spaces. It is the only way we will get to zero.

*On November 18th - The World Day for the Prevention of and Healing from Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Violence, Sophia is launching season two of her podcast Secrets Worth Sharing, which will focus on safe sex work and repeated abuse behaviors among other topics.