Theatre maker Viv Gordon performs Cutting Out. Viv is sat at a table cutting out images with a pair of scissors. She is wearing a brown jump suit

Cutting Out, written and performed by Viv Gordon

Photo: Ed Felton

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Creative project will support survivors of child sexual abuse

Project designed to give survivors a creative platform to share their experiences, rights and concerns, receives multi-year funding from the Home Office.

Patrick Jowett
2 min read

A creative project supporting survivors of child sexual abuse has received multi-year funding from the Home Office.

UpFront Survivors, a project by Somerset-based creative practitioners Viv Gordon Company, will be funded through to 2025 by the Home Office’s Support for Victims and Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse fund.

The project has been created to give creative opportunities to child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, with each workstream designed, produced and led by CSA victims and survivors.

Viv Gordon Company works to remove barriers to cultural participation for CSA survivors through performances, installations, poetry, writing, workshops, campaigns and consultancy work, with a focus on giving survivors the cultural space to highlight their experiences, rights and concerns.

The company’s Artistic Director, Viv Gordon, said CSA survivors lack representation in the arts sector and wider society.

“Survivors of CSA do not have existing role models or cultural infrastructure like other marginalised communities. Our experiences have been taboo and our voices omitted from diversity and inclusion discourses,” Gordon added.

“The only way to change this is to build a visible, peer-led, and accessible survivor community in partnership with frontline services that can provide effective sustainable support.”

The project will operate across four programme strands, consisting of workshops, workshop leader training, a monthly forum and cultural and community spaces including pop-up events and the Beyond Therapy Festival of Activism Against CSA, which will take place in Bristol in May.

Minister for Safeguarding, Conservative MP Sarah Dines, said the Home Office is pleased to provide funding to “this worthy project as part of our commitment to going further to support survivors”.

"Child sexual abuse is a horrific crime against the most vulnerable in our society, with devastating lifelong impacts on victims and survivors. It is vital that those with lived experience receive the support they need, and that their voices are heard.”