| Summary: | <p><strong>Dedications</strong></p></br>
<p>This thesis is dedicated to Oxfordshire Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre’s (‘OSARCC’s’) helpline. Beginning life as a collective of women in 1979, the helpline continued to take hundreds of calls each year until July 2023. On 28th July 2023 the helpline paused due to a lack of funding. My time ‘taking the line’ at OSARCC was a rare and precious gift, which taught me that every conversation, no matter how short, matters.</p>
<p>This thesis is also dedicated to each support worker who participated in interviews, from services across the sector affiliated to the London Survivors Gateway, the Male Survivors Partnership, Rape Crisis England & Wales, and The Survivors Trust. Thank you for sharing your time and your stories with me. Listening to, and learning from, you were amongst the greatest privileges of my life. This thesis would, and could, not exist without you.</p></br>
<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p></br>
<p>British feminist legal and socio-legal scholarship have made vital contributions to knowledge about sexual violence. In early feminist legal scholarship, the production of this knowledge constituted a form of feminist praxis: scholarship was a means of consciousness-raising, and breaking the pervasive cultural silence surrounding, sexual abuse. However, within these literatures, analysis of the criminal justice system (‘CJS’) and its treatment of survivors remains the predominant focus. Acknowledging the contributions that this scholarship has made, this thesis calls for a shift to spaces that appear to exist outside of the CJS. It turns to English sexual violence support services (‘support services’) as crucial sites of enquiry, within which legal discourse about sexual violence might be absent or resisted and alternative understandings made possible.</p>
<p>Charting the history of the American and English anti-rape movements, this project addresses a paucity of research into the origins of English support services. Following feminist methodological commitments, it argues for greater attention to be paid to the voices of the workers within them. Grounded in qualitative interviews with 64 sexual violence support workers (‘support workers’), it traces processes of professionalisation and depoliticisation within the English context. Departing from the US scholarship however, this thesis argues that politicised, albeit quiet, understandings of sexual violence persist.</p>
<p>This study then examines the impact of official guidance concerning the work of Independent Sexual Violence Advisers and pre-trial therapy. It contends that this guidance shapes the conversations able to happen within independent support services themselves. It argues that English support services appear uncomfortably entangled with a capillary-like CJS. However, attending to support workers’ reflections on the power of listening within their work, this thesis resists a reading of law’s power as uniform or total. Instead, it concludes that support workers facilitate alternative discourses about sexual violence alongside, and despite, pervasive legal discourse.</p>
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