What If We Organized Survivors of Sexual Violence?

Every few months America discovers another “monster.”

A celebrity. A billionaire. A politician. A religious leader. A professor. A CEO.

The details differ, but the story doesn’t: rape survivors risk everything revealing years of abuse, followed by a burst of public outrage and demands for accountability. 

Then the news cycle moves on.

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein told us about a global rape and sex-trafficking network in which young people were abused and exploited by some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential men. For decades, survivors were ignored, disbelieved, and failed by the institutions around them. Newly released files corroborating their horror stories have resulted in zero US criminal arrests and little tangible accountability.

The #MeToo movement was supposed to interrupt this cycle. For a brief moment in 2017, it seemed possible that we could stop treating each “scandal” as an isolated incident and confront the systems connecting them. Instead, less than three months after the hashtag went viral, the press was full of opinion pieces about how it had all “gone too far.” The backlash flipped #MeToo into #NotAllMen. Outrage faded into fatalism, denial, and eventually business as usual.

As a rape survivor, community activist, and labor organizer, I call bullshit.

The problem isn’t that we keep “discovering” abusive men. It’s that we keep refusing to look at the underlying systems that reproduce sexual violence. Instead, we focus on finding, exposing, and punishing the monster du jour (or not) and then wait for the next one.

What we haven’t built is survivor power. Survivors are a constituency with the potential to change the social, political, and material conditions that enable violence and produce abuses of power.

Survivor power is not simply inviting us to the table or ensuring we are represented in leadership. It begins when we invite survivors to bring their full selves. Survivor power is built in the movement by moving from isolation to connection, from private shame to shared analysis, and from shared analysis to collective action. And because sexual violence is enabled by unequal distributions of power, survivor power means changing the basic conditions that make people vulnerable to violence in the first place: economic precarity, workplace exploitation, racism, misogyny, housing insecurity, and isolation.

We use the term power-based violence more than gender-based or sexual violence with survivors. It shifts our focus from seemingly separate forms of harm toward the throughline that links rape and domestic violence to workplace sexual harassment and coercion to the daily intimidation of strangers shouting obscenities and catcalls.

Survivor power is the power to imagine and build what does not yet exist. 

What the reckonings have missed

More than 90 percent of adult rape victims are women and over 80 percent of survivors under the age of 18 are girls. Of every 100 survivors, 98 of them are raped by men. The vast majority of male survivors are also assaulted by men. Abusers are almost never strangers.

Sexual abuse and harassment aren’t isolated incidents just because they happen behind closed doors (or on private islands). They are expressions of ideology–a structural pattern of male power and control that reproduces itself from the intimate to the institutional and beyond.

Violence–and the ever-present threat of it–shapes where women go, whom they trust, what jobs they take, how they move through public space, and hundreds of other daily micro-calculations about their bodies and lives. Criminalized survivor and Chicago abolitionist organizer Monica Cosby maps out these similarities in the reframing of State Power and Control Wheel tracing how dynamics familiar from domestic violence–coercion, isolation, surveillance, economic control, threats, and violence–are also wielded through institutions and the state.

Yet we continue funding systems designed primarily to (inadequately) respond to violence while dramatically underinvesting in the people and strategies capable of changing the conditions that produce it. In 2026, the Violence Against Women Act and related sexual and gender-based violence programs received roughly $720 million–less than the cost of the White House renovation. Within these limited resources, funding overwhelmingly flows toward what happens after the harm is done.

The state’s narrow mandate to identify, prosecute and remove the “monster” has failed to make us safe. Only a tiny fraction of sexual assaults result in prosecution, while an estimated 95% of incarcerated women have themselves experienced interpersonal violence. That is not an argument for putting more people in prison. It is an indictment of a system that has made punishment our primary measure of prevention and accountability while doing remarkably little to change the societal conditions that produce violence in the first place.

And, survivors are already in your organizing spaces. The question is whether they can bring their full selves and experiences.

What we’re left with is a collective shrug and a wearied acceptance that maybe misogyny is just too big to fail. The carousel of “scandals” spins so fast it begins to feel inevitable – too vast to confront, too entrenched to interrupt, too powerful to stop. That sense of inevitability is part of what keeps us spinning. We are stuck because we have invested so deeply in systems organized around individual perpetrators that we struggle to imagine how to build systems organized around survivors and collective safety.

What would it actually mean to center survivors–not symbolically, not after we have been harmed, but structurally?

Toward Survivor-Powered Models

A basic organizing tenet is that power protects itself, unless and until it is forced not to. Three decades as a labor and community organizer shaped how I understood my assault and healing. Organizing taught me to ask questions like: How does power operate? Who benefits from the status quo? What systems allow harm to continue?

I benefited from privilege and access very few survivors experience. My father was friends with a senior Chicago detective, so word spread to “treat me like their daughter.” DNA from my rape kit was tested within ten days. Investigators returned my calls, kept me informed, and prioritized my case. Ultimately, a serial rapist went to prison. By conventional measures, justice was served. At the time, I understood this as the system working.

Years later, I understand it differently. I was watching the state unevenly distribute protection, deciding implicitly and explicitly whose safety mattered. As a college-educated white woman raped by a Black stranger on a dark, empty street, I fit neatly into the mythology of the “perfect victim,” while my rapist fit just as neatly into its racist counterpart.

At Survivors Know, we start by talking about power. Treating sexual violence as a private burden obscures its root causes and purpose. That narrows our response to managing symptoms by helping people survive violence rather than changing the systems that produce it.

We use the term power-based violence more than gender-based or sexual violence with survivors. It shifts our focus from seemingly separate forms of harm toward the throughline that links rape and domestic violence to workplace sexual harassment and coercion to the daily intimidation of strangers shouting obscenities and catcalls. By listening to and centering survivors, we’ve built on a framework that examines how power and control are asserted, maintained, justified, and normalized. When we extend this understanding beyond interpersonal harm we can see those same dynamics of power and control operating at a structural level.

The circumstances and scale are different, but the mechanisms can be hauntingly familiar: fear, isolation, coercion, forced dependence, surveillance, and impunity. That lens helps us understand what is happening around us now–from the expansion of ICE and its enforcement power to the broader authoritarian project reshaping our policies and public life.

When violence is understood as a problem of power rather than individual pathology, survivors can move from carrying private shame to building collective change.

One place where we are experimenting with what that looks like is the Reimagining Safety & Justice Cohort. The cohort brings together frontline anti-violence workers (social workers, hotline responders, case managers, circle keepers, advocates and survivors themselves) to develop and launch non-carceral responses to power-based violence. Over several months, they learn from one another, map systems of power, explore healing-centered and abolitionist frameworks, and transform their ideas into tangible projects.

This August, they presented what they had built over four months: 

Grief circles created by and for Black trans survivors; youth-led sex education responding to community violence; young men organizing other young men to interrupt gender-based violence; a survivor-designed fund treating money as a question of power and redistribution; a project using pop culture and music to challenge the normalization of rape culture; survivor-led evaluation of programs serving queer survivors of childhood sexual assault; and nail sets for survivors, pairing one-on-one connection with the idea that survival and “luxury” belong together.

This is the transformative power of organizing survivors to come together and create forms of safety that our existing systems have conditioned us not to imagine.

As Cierra Olivia Thomas Williams, Survivors Know board member and Director of Nothing Without Us Collective, puts it:

Conflict, when held with purpose, becomes the uplift. When systems tighten around us, we rise through collective resistance. We have been here before, and before, and before. Together, we create the conditions for transformation, even when the process feels impossibly slow or invisible. The unseen labor of your care work is snowmelt. A trickle becomes a river. A river becomes an ocean. From an ocean comes life. Every story circle, every person now safe is an act of creation. As the political storm rages and policies strip our communities bare, rise slowly, carry memory. Our work takes disruption, pressure, and persistence. It takes time measured in layers. To survivors, to movement makers, my message to you is to remember we are tectonic. Be the Mountain.

Survivor Organizing IS Transformative Organizing

Our progressive movement has a lot of catching up to do.

A lasting and welcome impact of #MeToo has been a shift toward believing survivors. Now we need to build survivor power.

Collective advocacy by Epstein survivors helped force rare bipartisan congressional action after years of reporting and political pressure. That matters. But much of the public attention remains fixated on who is “on the list”–individual perpetrators, celebrities, and political scandal–rather than the systems of wealth, access, institutional protection, and impunity that allowed abuse to continue for decades. Survivor testimony can expose power without redistributing it.

Survivors are not a niche group. We are one of the largest–and least organized–constituencies in America. More than half of women and nearly one in three men have experienced sexual violence. That does not mean survivors share a political analysis–or even the same understanding of what happened to us. That is precisely why organizing matters.

And, survivors are already in your organizing spaces. The question is whether they can bring their full selves and experiences. Organizing survivors does not always mean creating a separate survivor space. It means creating opportunities for people already in our movements to name how violence and power have shaped their lives, connect those experiences to broader systems, and act together to change them.

There is something powerful about connecting personal transformation to structural organizing. Survivor organizing addresses what we need now while connecting those needs to the systems and conditions that produced them. It allows the wholeness of our experiences to be present. And when that happens, something begins to shift. We can loosen our dependency on oppressive systems that have taught us they are our only source of safety and begin to imagine together what we actually need to be safe, connected, and able to thrive.

That possibility must extend beyond the anti-violence movement and requires bringing a deeper analysis of power into anti-violence work and a deeper analysis of violence into organizing spaces.

It requires our movements to change the typical response to allegations of sexual harassment and abuse that often emerge during elections. Every time, instead of relying on clear, survivor-centered processes established before the allegations surface, there is a default to the familiar pattern. Political operatives, surrogates, and the media interrogate the survivor. Their credibility, mental health, sexual history, and motivations are matters of public scrutiny, while calculations about viability, electability, party loyalty, and political consequences shape the response by parties, politicians and organizations..

A structural, meaningful response would look very different. It would establish transparent standards and independent processes before allegations arise. Believing survivors would be a starting point for taking allegations seriously, not a predetermined conclusion. Investigations would be insulated from political interference. Survivors would be protected from retaliation and proxy attacks. And those principles would apply consistently, regardless of the political affiliation, popularity, or perceived “winnability” of the candidate.

Beyond a fair process, we need to strengthen our collective muscle to recognize abuses of power, intervene meaningfully, and support those that come forward. And commit to changing the cultures and power structures that incentivize silence and enable abuse to take root and thrive.

The upcoming elections offer a glimpse into what could be possible if and when we decide that organizing matters. Political spending in the 2026 midterms is projected to top $11.6 billion. Campaigns, PACs, unions and big donors are pouring resources into reaching, persuading, and mobilizing voters.

Winning elections matters enormously–especially now. But mobilizing people to win an election is not the same as organizing them to build solidarity, develop leadership, and wield collective power over the conditions of their lives. Imagine bringing even a fraction of that seriousness (and money) to organizing survivors.

Imagine treating survivors not as victims, clients, voters, storytellers, or recipients of care, but as a mass constituency with knowledge, ideas, leadership, and power worth investing in.

We can keep mistaking outrage for transformation. Or we can organize. Survivors are already part of our movements and our communities. It’s time to support the infrastructure for us to find one another. It’s time to give us the resources to take what we know and turn that knowledge into collective power. The next time we discover another monster, we can demand accountability–and refuse to stop there.

In the moments when I have felt most untethered, it has been through my relationships with fellow survivors that I’ve regained myself. This essay is for you. You remind me that healing–like liberation–is something we create together, in community, through collective care for one another.

Acknowledgements: This essay was a labor of love, grief, hope, and, yes, rage. It took shape over many months through countless conversations, wordsmithing, and revisions. Thank you to the many survivors and anti-violence workers whose insights, organizing, and care continue to shape how I understand power, healing, and what it takes to build a world beyond violence. A special thank you to Timi Gerson, whose clarity, generosity, and extraordinary gift for words made this piece immeasurably stronger. Your thoughtful questions, careful edits, and unwavering belief in this work helped transform my scattered ideas into something far more coherent and courageous. Thanks also to Rebecca Wilson Bretz, Ebony Thornton, Meher Rehman, Sara Ogawa, Maurice BP-Weeks, and Ann Russo .