“True liberation must come from within. I am a Black feminist lesbian who is a survivor of both incest/child sexual abuse and rape. What better individuals to lead the movement to end child sexual abuse than those of us who have not only been directly impacted, but who are actively engaged in transforming that unspeakable trauma and terror into healing and liberation? Love, for me, is a verb—an action—and I continuously strive to be the embodiment of what I want to womanifest in this work.”
Photo credit: Zhee chatmon
Created by award-winning cultural worker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, love WITH Accountability® centers diasporic Black survivors, and focuses on radical healing and accountability. The project explores how we can disrupt and end the inhumane child sexual abuse pandemic, humanely. it also examines how the silence around child sexual abuse in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions-- religious, academic, activist, political and professional. Survivor-centered healing and accountability without relying on policing and prisons is love and radical justice.
Aishah's spiritual, healing, and activist work are the foundation of love WITH accountability®. The words "Love WITH Accountability" literally emerged from within during one of her extended Vipassanā meditation sessions at home. The meditation cushion through her long-term, daily Vipassanā meditation practice was Aishah's metaphorical and literal refuge in the fire of her parents' initial unwillingness to face the seemingly unfaceable reality of their bystanding roles in her childhood sexual abuse. She could not force them to deal. Yet, she kept trying. Demanding a conversation with her divorced parents about their lack of response to her childhood sexual abuse, Aishah signed "Love WITH Accountability" in virtually every communiqué to them. In doing so, Aishah emphasized that her deep love for her parents could not shield their lack of accountability for the sexual violence she endured as a child and their subsequent 30-year cover-up.
Aishah relied on her meditative practice, therapeutic support from her Black feminist licensed psychologist at the time, and her cultivated community. Meditation, therapy, and community supported Aishah from being subsumed in the mud of trauma and suffering. Instead, she slowly learned how to work with the nutrients the mud provided her on her continuous healing journey. This understanding emerged from, “No mud. No lotus.” The teaching and writing are from ancestor, Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, and master teacher, who taught that without mud, the beautiful lotus flower could not grow.”
Aishah officially launched love WITH accountability® in 2016, thirty-seven years after she was first sexually molested by her paternal step-grandfather. She invited an intergenerational group of twenty-nine diasporic Black cisgender women, gender non-conforming people, trans and cisgender men to join her on The Feminist Wire to explore what “love WITH accountability” looks like in the context of child sexual abuse. The group included survivors, advocates, and Aishah's mother, who wrote publicly for the first time acknowledging what happened to Aishah and the three-decades cover up.
Since the launch of love WITH accountability®, Aishah traveled extensively across the United Stated to engage in public and private intergenerational conversations. During her travels, realized that Aishah wanted and needed to go more in-depth than the online forum. As a survivor, Aishah is unwavering in her belief that every victim/survivor must take the avenues, which best support their full recovery and total healing. Her strongly advocating for alternatives to the criminal justice system is an invitation to deeply interrogate how and why calling the police is presented as the only solution to the violence victim/survivors face?
She curated and edited, the October 2019 released, leading edge anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. The co-winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology, the collection features 44-diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates who use transformative storytelling to explore how we can disrupt and end the global epidemic of child sexual abuse without solely relying on the draconian criminal justice apparatus.
Love WITH accountability® builds and creates healing space for diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates to use their lived experiences, testimonies, and work as the foundation to co-envision how we can eradicate childhood sexual abuse without relying on the same systems that dehumanize and brutalize Black people. Aishah is explicitly clear that we have to use compassionate discernment in all of our approaches to disrupt and end the violence. If we don’t, we risk being eaten alive and transforming into the very entities we seek to dismantle. When we are accountable to ourselves, to our families, our extended communities and beyond, we have the capacity to center healing while we work to disrupt and end the inhumane, humanely.