Amplifying Survivor Voice Series: Recognising Lived Experience as Expertise
Part 1
About the series
The Amplifying Survivor Voice series considers the contribution survivor knowledge can make to understanding abuse, institutional responses and the conditions that allow harm to continue.
The series examines how recognising lived experience as expertise can inform research, policy, practice, organisational learning and prevention, while acknowledging that there is no single survivor voice and that responsibility for reform remains with institutions.
This first article introduces lived experience as a source of knowledge. The remainder of the series focuses on how organisations can incorporate survivor voice into better safeguarding practice.
The full series includes:
Part 1: Recognising Lived Experience as Expertise
Part 2: From Listening to Institutional Learning
Part 3: Principles for Meaningful Participation
Part 4: The Contribution of Survivor Knowledge to Prevention
Learning from lived experience
Harm is often spoken about as if it is confined to a single event. In reality, it can unfold over years, sometimes decades. It can continue through the silence that follows disclosure, systems that fail to listen and institutional responses that add to the original harm. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that the effects of abuse may persist or emerge across a person’s life and can be compounded by experiences before, during and after the abuse.
The voice of survivors is one of the most powerful sources of knowledge for understanding the impacts of abuse, institutional failure and the conditions that allow harm to continue. Yet historically, survivor voice has too often been marginalised, questioned, reframed or included in ways that are symbolic rather than influential.
When survivor voices are ignored or minimised, institutions lose access to some of the clearest available evidence of how harm is enabled and repeated.
When lived experience is recognised as expertise, survivor knowledge can shape research, policy and practice, and contribute to organisational change. It can also show where risk sits in an institution, including the cultural blind spots that formal systems may miss. Survivor knowledge not only tells us what happened, it tells us what must change.
Survivor perspectives on justice and repair
The work of psychiatrist and researcher Judith Herman provides a framework for understanding survivor experience as a source of knowledge about trauma, justice and recovery. Her work has profoundly shaped contemporary understandings of trauma, particularly trauma arising from child sexual abuse, sexual violence, family violence and other forms of interpersonal harm. Across decades of clinical practice and research, she has listened closely to the lived experiences of survivors and treated those experiences as a source of knowledge, not just accounts of injury.
In Truth and Repair, Herman examines justice from the perspective of survivors. Instead of assuming that formal systems know what justice should look like, Herman asks what survivors need for repair. For survivors, justice may include acknowledgement, truth-telling, accountability, apology, protection of others and meaningful change. These are not secondary concerns. They are often central to whether an institutional response compounds harm or begins to repair it. A scholarly review of the book highlights Herman’s understanding of the role justice can play in healing through restitution and prevention.
This approach can also shape how institutions understand and respond to harm. Survivor knowledge can bring attention to missed warning signs and procedural failures that have compounded original harm. Meaningful listening requires more than a space for disclosure. It requires an openness to the ways survivor knowledge can challenge established understandings, expose institutional failures and identify the changes needed for safer environments.
Lived experience as research expertise
Across her writing on survivor voice and survivor involvement in research, Carol Ronken, Director of Research at Bravehearts, draws an important distinction between inviting survivors to share their experiences and recognising lived experience as expertise. Survivor engagement, she argues, is meaningful when it moves beyond personal accounts and gives survivors a genuine role in shaping the research. Without this, participation can remain symbolic and token. This is especially true when consultation begins after priorities have already been set, or when survivors are asked to comment on systems they had no part in designing.
This does not mean that survivor knowledge displaces professional research expertise. It is an additional input that acknowledges some dimensions of harm and recovery cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of those who have experienced them.
Reflecting on what she has learned through her work, Ronken writes:
“Adult survivors have fundamentally shaped our understanding of trauma, disclosure, recovery and what meaningful support looks like. Their lived experience has challenged assumptions, highlighted gaps in systems, and influenced the way we think about prevention, early intervention and response.”
Co-creation and co-design
Enabling these contributions depends on how participation is designed. Survivors need safe and accessible ways to take part, with appropriate support and recognition of their knowledge. They also need honesty about the limits of the process. Without this, engagement can become extractive, drawing on survivor knowledge while leaving institutional priorities unchanged.
These principles are reflected in the Council of Europe’s Nothing About Us Without Us policy on engaging with victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Developed by survivor advocates, the guidelines promote genuine and strategic engagement with survivors as co-creators, co-designers and expert advisers, recognising the contribution that lived experience expertise can make to policy, program and organisational development.
Watch this video shared by Michelle D (lived experience expert, advocate, co-founder of the NI Survivor Council and member of the Brave Movement), which highlights key themes from the Nothing About Us Without Us: Expert Insights Report and the importance of creating meaningful opportunities for survivors to contribute their knowledge and expertise.
The value of survivor engagement lies in its capacity to strengthen research, improve services, test assumptions and identify risks that might otherwise be missed. As Ronken argues, systems need to be prepared not only to listen, but also to act.