A participatory, community-based approach to addressing gender-based violence enables us to engage with participants in their everyday environments, capturing the complex social processes, cultural meanings, and embodied experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed. By prioritizing participants’ perspectives and situated knowledges, we gain deeper insight into how they navigate power dynamics and culturally specific forms of harm, resilience, and resistance.

The DSVR project examines experiences of and responses to sexual violence within Nigerian communities, a key site in the Global South, both locally and across the diaspora. Having completed the pilot phase in Nigeria through deep, community-based engagement with survivors and local networks, the next phase will cover he same population group within the UK diaspora.

Through the DSVR project, we aim to gain insight into:

• How survivors interpret their understanding and experiences of sexual violence within the context of cultural expectations and racialised perceptions.

• How trust (or lack thereof) in institutions like the police shapes decisions around disclosure and help-seeking.

• How social isolation, religious and gendered norms, poverty and lack of education exacerbate vulnerability to sexual violence.

• Survivors’ strategies of resistance and resilience, including the use of informal networks or community-led forms of care.