This blog post mentions sexual violence. Sources of support and help are available to explore here.
In early Spring 2022, I emailed the CEO of the national charity Rape Crisis England & Wales (RCEW). RCEW is ‘the feminist charity working to end child sexual abuse, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and all other forms of sexual violence’ and is the umbrella organisation for 37 autonomous Rape Crisis centres delivering frontline, specialist support across England and Wales (RCEW, 2025). As a DPhil student funded by the Grand Union DTP, I had attended an ESRC workshop that provided information on designing a placement with non-academic stakeholders for impact and knowledge exchange. Keen to collaborate with a non-academic partner, I wished to work with RCEW as a way of giving back to a sector that had contributed to my doctoral project.
My DPhil at the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies examined the ways that sexual violence is talked about and understood by those working within English sexual violence support services. As part of this, I undertook 64 interviews with those working within and volunteering for support services across England. The ESRC placement offered an opportunity to contribute to a sector that has faced continuous, chronic under-funding and capacity constraints over its 50 year history. With this in mind, I wrote to RCEW to ask whether the charity would be interested in co-designing a three-month placement fully funded by the ESRC.
Happily, RCEW wished to collaborate, and I met with the CEO to discuss the scope and shape of the placement to ensure a two-way flow of knowledge. In practice, this took the form of talking through key areas for RCEW, within which the research and writing skills I had gained through my DPhil might be particularly helpful. This included work within the policy team around changes to the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) guidance concerning pre-trial therapy in May 2022. Pre-trial therapy refers to therapeutic support survivors of sexual violence access whilst they are engaged in the criminal justice system. Since the early 2000s, the CPS has issued guidance concerning this form of therapeutic support, which includes requests for and disclosures of survivors’ therapeutic notes during criminal justice proceedings. Undertaking the placement from June-September 2022, I worked within RCEW’s policy team on the organisation’s Keep Counselling Confidential campaign. This involved researching into request and disclosure practices in other jurisdictions, meeting with a pioneering Australian Rape Crisis activist, working with the Centre for Women’s Justice and End Violence Against Women coalition to produce a briefing report, and holding a drop-in session for Members of Parliament in Westminster. Along with sustained public affairs efforts, this work contributed to a landmark legal change, which introduced a higher threshold for requests for survivors’ therapeutic records by police.
Completing this placement contributed to my personal and academic development as a researcher in several ways. It allowed me to reflect on key themes that had arisen during my fieldwork interviews, such as the meaning and impact of pre-trial therapy, within the fast-paced arena of policy work. This placement also allowed me to enact key feminist methodological and ethical commitments, for instance reciprocity within research, and developed my understanding of anti-oppressive working principles. Additionally, completing the internship allowed me to build ongoing connections between non-academic and academic partners; the placement resulted in a current partnership project between the Oxford CSLS, RCEW, and National Life Stories, at the British Library, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
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