The Listen, Believe, Affirm project came out of our work with the Centre of Expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre). With their support, we carried out a survey across Change Grow Live to understand the level of skills and knowledge around child sexual abuse. We discovered that all of the tools were there – it was just a question of making sure those conversations happen. We needed to ensure that our staff felt comfortable and supported to ask the right questions, and that people were given the space to answer openly.
We had the opportunity to bring something to light that’s so rarely spoken about. We ask so many personal questions of people as a part of their support with us – why not ask them if they’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse?
Our first step was to train a series of practice leads to act as our organisational experts on psycho-educative work, myth busting, and how to build confidence and communication with people who’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse. Since then we’ve continued to build on this work and embed our learnings across the organisation. We’ve created accessible learning tools and run national conversation sessions to bring together voices of staff, experts, and people with lived experience of childhood sexual abuse. Through joint working with the Victim Support charity, we’ve carried out free online training for more than 800 of our staff and volunteers.
As the work began to take shape, the project became Listen, Believe, Affirm because those are the things we were hearing that people wanted. Not everyone wants extra support or a specific intervention based on their experiences – people just want to be asked the question and be heard, and to have their experience validated. Then they can make the decision that’s right for them.
We want to move towards a whole-person approach that considers all the factors in someone’s life. It’s about creating the conditions where people feel safe and where their substance use is seen as a symptom of trauma instead of a lifestyle choice. We’ve had people tell us that they’d never really discussed their experiences before, and that their lives might have been very different if someone had just asked them, and acknowledged what had happened to them.
Normalising the conversation around childhood sexual abuse is an important step in helping people feel comfortable linking past experiences to their current selves. And that process of normalising the conversation includes the conversations we are having as an organisation. By asking the right questions we can empower people to make the changes they want.
Ellie Reed is head of social work and Nicola Wendel is national CSE lead at Change Grow Live.
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Change Grow Live’s services work with so many people who have experienced trauma, including sexual abuse as a child. We know that childhood sexual abuse can be a contributory factor in problematic drug and alcohol use in adulthood, but there’s still so much stigma around discussing it openly.
It’s something that people may never have been asked about, or even felt comfortable to talk about. There’s a lot of fear across professionals – if they ask the wrong question, will they bring something up and make things worse?
We are proud to work in partnership with many of the leading charities and treatment providers in the sector.
So what we decided to do at Cranstoun was create a pouch that contained enough equipment to support the person administering naloxone in one of these risky situations. We decided that our pouches should contain a number of useful items, which are kept together for ease of access. 
The passion the peer team bought to the table was quite amazing. You could really tell these pouches meant something personally to them. Without them, 2,000 would still be sat in boxes and I would be facing a telling off! So from me and all the people who now have a pouch, nice one PACKS – you did a mighty fine job on these! 
One thing we did notice when we were doing the naloxone training in public with the peer team was that sometimes people were interested in naloxone but didn’t have time to do the full training. So Deb from our Sutton service, the PACKS peer team and myself designed a Z-CARD which would contain all the key naloxone training information that could be given to someone with a kit. We know that if they read it they’ll have all the information needed to use the kit successfully. 
Watershed Moment
Drilling into the detail – The Data
Anna Millington established a non-funded, non-affiliated support network for mothers who use drugs. It seeks to work collaboratively with professionals – on its own terms.
We’re Not Going Away
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Women supporting women – stories from the frontline 
From the street
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In my role as Turning Point’s national safer lives lead, I co-chaired the conference with our clinical director Dr David Bremner. After working in harm reduction for many years I joined Turning Point in 2020 as harm reduction manager for our Somerset service, and when I was offered the opportunity to expand this harm reduction work as national safer lives lead I jumped at the chance. The role allows me to support Turning Point in our increased focus on harm reduction while working across our services to increase naloxone awareness, distribution, and carriage. I plan to put lived experience at the centre of what I do and one of my first aims is to expand our peer-led naloxone distribution programme. 
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