Love WITH Accountability

Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

Despite the current survivor-affirming awareness around sexual violence, child sexual abuse, most notably when it’s a family member or friend, is still a very taboo topic. There are approximately 42 million child sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. and millions of bystanders who look the other way as the abuse occurs and cover for the harm-doers with no accountability.

Documentary filmmaker and survivor of child sexual abuse and adult rape, Aishah Shahidah Simmons invites diasporic Black people to join her in transformative storytelling that envisions a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on the criminal justice system. Love WITH Accountability features compelling writings by child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Simmons’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. This collection explores disrupting the inhumane epidemic of child sexual abuse, humanely. 

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black lesbian activist, cultural worker, international lecturer, and award-winning documentary filmmaker of NO! The Rape Documentary. Simmons is a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Ortner Center on Violence & Abuse in Relationships, University of Pennsylvania.