Archival Debts, High Stakes, and Intersubjectivities in Trauma-informed Approaches to Archives of Child Sexual Abuse

Historically, archives relating to child sexual abuse (CSA) have centred institutional and professional interests rather than the lived experiences and personal narratives of survivors, reinscribing processes by which they have been systematically disempowered, silenced, and harmed. In this article we explore alternative trauma-informed practices that centre CSA survivors and introduce our in-progress project to resource counter-archives. Case studies of the archives of the survivor-activist Rasjidah St. John (1929-2017) and of LOUDfence UK, a protest and healing movement for survivors of CSA in religious settings, are used to investigate survivor-centred approaches to archival creation, identification, and preservation. Both archives are constructed through collaboration - with family members; activists; archivists; and our University legal and ethics teams. We consider the affordances of these complex, often fraught relationships, drawing out questions of personal and scholarly obligations, as well as intersecting debts, duties and responsibilities, while remaining attentive to intersubjectivity and vulnerance. We argue that trauma-informed archival interventions have much to learn from methodological reflection within oral history praxis when addressing the multiple challenges of memory work that is characterised by complex and often unresolved trauma.