The Need

Every five minutes in the UK someone is raped. One in four women and one in six men have experienced sexual violence. 15% of girls and 5% of boys have experienced sexual violence by the time they are sixteen.

Who are we?

The Survivors Trust is the largest umbrella agency for specialist rape and sexual abuse services in the UK and has been providing infrastructure support to our members for the past 15 years. We have 124 member agencies based in the UK and Ireland providing information, advice, support and therapy to over 80,000 individual survivors each year. Our services work with victims and survivors of all ages, all genders, of all forms of sexual violence, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, including support for partners and family members. 

The Survivors Trust and its members are committed to the fair treatment of people regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age or physical/learning disability.

Our Trustee Board is exclusively made up of Managers and Directors of rape and sexual abuse support services. Our core aim is to ensure that society supports all survivors effectively and takes responsibility for ending sexual violence. 

Our Core Belief

We believe that rape and sexual abuse of women, men, non-binary people and children is wrong and challenge society to end it.

Our Aims

To support and empower survivors of rape, sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse through;

• Providing a collective voice and peer networking for specialist rape and sexual abuse support services
• Education about all forms of sexual violence and their effect on victims-survivors, their supporters and society at large
• Informing acknowledgement of, and effective responses to, sexual violence and sexual abuse on a local, regional and national level

Our Story

The Survivors Trust was founded out of a need for specialist trauma services to help each other to survive in a difficult climate. Back in the year 2000 it was hit and miss whether victims and survivors could find the support to help them recover from the trauma of sexual violence and abuse. Most specialist services worked in isolation and there were no regional or national funding streams for support. Centres struggled to find the resources they needed themselves and many closed as a result of lack of funding. It was at this point that The Survivors Trust came into being. The managers of six small specialist charities came together to offer each other peer support and encouragement,  advice on managing trauma services, and share information about how to gain funding to deliver them. 15 years later, The Survivors Trust still offers this support to specialist services and provides a national voice for the sector and its clients.