This ethnographic research project was created to address a critical gap in how sexual violence is understood and responded to in Nigerian communities, both locally and in the UK diaspora. Unlike traditional studies, we uses a visual participatory, community-based approach. We work with women and service providers in their everyday environments and on their own terms, capturing their social, cultural and embodied realities. This enables us to move beyond extractive accounts of sexual harm and gain deeper insight into how survivors navigate power, identity and resistance.

In Nigeria, we explore how survivors interpret their understanding and experiences of sexual violence. We also examine how state institutions shape disclosure and help-seeking practices.

In the UK, we aim to understand the everyday strategies of resistance and resilience that survivors draw on, such as informal networks, diasporic community solidarities and culturally embedded forms of care, which are reshaped and re-imagined across transnational spaces.

Ongoing Impact Activities

• Knowledge exchange events, co-delivered with NGOs, to inform survivor support services and develop culturally responsive intervention models.

• Creative platforms for survivors to narrate their experiences and strategies of resistance through art - a process that serves simultaneously as participatory knowledge production and a means of advocacy that reshapes community conversations around sexual violence.

• Community training sessions to build understanding of the sociocultural dynamics of sexual violence and challenge harmful norms that sustain it.