Survivors West Yorkshire (SWY)

Perkin House
Longlands Street
Bradford
West Yorkshire
BD1 2TP
Tel. 01274 965 009
Email: ops@survivorswestyorkshire.org.uk
www.survivorswestyorkshire.org.uk

CAMPAIGN MESSAGE

'Gaslighting, takes us on an authentic journey - capturing the reality of the lived experiences of a working class sexually abused child. Intelligence isn’t owned by one class. In this case the young girl can’t articulate the ‘unspeakable’ to escape her nightmare and find other creative, if negative ways to tell. She is trapped in the nightmare but not defeated by it and seeks agency at every opportunity. As she not only endures sexual violence herself, but has to watch others being groomed around her.

The silence around sexual violence is a prison full of horrors for the child often - beyond their own personal abuse. Brook is a reflection of the lived experience of 1000’s of children each day. This film pulls no punches. Delivered by professional actors you can smell the dog shit on the back lawn.

Anyone who has visited or lived in such environments will know its an authentic world being shown. The film feels very working class and makes no apologies for that in its story-telling. It will be triggering for many. However, its insights should be seen widely by both the public and professionals across all disciplines. Brook speaks to us all of the need to light a fire of hope for such children. We need to stop asking what's wrong with them and instead ask what is or has happened to them.' - Bob Balfour, Founder Survivors West Yorkshire

ABOUT

Survivors West Yorkshire (SWY) is a survivor led and focused service. Its vision is to support evidenced based services that are gender informed and accessible across West Yorkshire. Services which are user friendly and proactively involve survivors.

Our aim is to created a specialist service that connects survivors and their supporters to professional services using good practice standards. Our focus is on cloud based support offering off-line options if appropriate for the survivor.

Our objective is to innovatively support the self-empowerment of adult survivors of sexual violence- abuse by developing robustly evaluated psychological interventions.

Supported by self – help knowledge and social action involvement platforms which allow survivors to become a supported collective expert resource to support policy and service improvements. Underpinned by partnership working to create collective impacts.