Our vision
We want a world without sexual violence where all women and girls live safely, freely and with dignity.
Our mission
We work for women and girls, in partnership with our member centres, to:
➡️ Transform attitudes about sexual violence and abuse.
➡️ Improve responses for all victims and survivors.
➡️ End sexual violence and abuse in all its forms.
How we do it
To achieve our mission, we believe that Rape Crisis England & Wales has a crucial role to play in:
- Believing victims and survivors, and helping them to get their voices heard.
- Fighting for victims and survivors to have access to specialist support.
- Raising awareness about the prevalence and impacts of sexual violence and abuse, and challenging rape culture.
- Influencing change in all aspects of public policy relating to sexual violence and abuse.
We are committed to intersectional feminism, anti-racism and anti-oppression.
Our strategic priorities 2022-25
Ensuring survivors can access support
We will fight for all women and girls to have access to specialist sexual violence and abuse services, and work alongside them to make sure that their voices are heard.
Supporting member Rape Crisis centres
We will offer support to members that is aimed at helping them to improve the lives of survivors.
Influencing change
We will push to influence policy, practice and public opinion for the benefit of all victims and survivors, and our member centres. This will involve standing up to those in power and making sure that they listen to the voices of women and girls.
Developing our organisation
We will make sure that how we work is in line with our intersectional feminist and anti-racist values. This will involve understanding how power operates in our organisation, making sure that our governance body (our board) is representative, diverse and fit for purpose, and lifting up the next generation of the Rape Crisis movement's leaders.
We will sustainably grow the resources we need to achieve our goals and make real change.
We centre survivors and value:
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We believe that all forms of violence against women and girls are both a cause and consequence of structural and social inequalities between men and women in wider society, that perpetrators should be held fully accountable for their actions, and that women and girls should be able to live their lives free from the fear, threat and reality of rape and sexual abuse.
We reject the idea that rape is inevitable and believe that ending it is achievable through prevention and intervention.
We think misogyny and harmful gender norms hurt men and boys as well as women and girls, and understand perpetration as the result of a complex interplay of social learning, impunity, and culturally inculcated attitudes and beliefs which encourage sexual entitlement and support the objectification and degradation of women and girls through sexual violence, abuse and coercion.
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We seek to proactively identify and address the ways in which inequalities in relation to factors such as sex, age, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, class and gender identity interact with one another, to compound and exacerbate the obstacles faced by survivors seeking freedom, restitution and recovery.
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We take a strengths-based approach, recognising that women and girls are the experts in their own lives.
At every stage of a victim or survivor's journey, we aim to lift them up, support them and build their confidence. We believe this is key to helping survivors regain control of their own lives, as well as to challenging the gender inequality that underpins sexual violence and abuse.
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We work in solidarity with others who oppose violence and oppression. We create a culture of mutual support and collaboration in our organisation, as well as across our network and in partnership with others, so that we become bigger than the sum of our parts.
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The Rape Crisis movement was created, and continues to develop, through the determination and innovation of victims and survivors.
Victims and survivors are at the heart of everything we do, and we always listen to and believe them.
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We are bold and brave because we have to be. Nothing less will do if we want to end the deep and widespread misogyny in our society that's harming the lives of women and girls.
This means we speak truth to power, are prepared to take risks, and don't shy away from conflict and difficult issues.
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We believe all survivors - adults and children, men and women - deserve to be heard, believed and supported following sexual violence, and that this includes specialist support when they need it, for as long as they need it.
As part of this, we celebrate difference, respect lived and learned experiences of sexual violence, and value each other for who we are.
We also aim to create a culture that encourages us to care for each other and ourselves.
50 Years of Rape Crisis: The Oral Herstory Project
Discover the history of Rape Crisis through our Oral Herstory Project, which honours the voices that built our 50-year legacy of feminist resistance, solidarity, and support.
