This is the final instalment of the VAWGRN November series of webinars. Find us on Twitter @VAWGRN and on www.vawgnetwork.mdx.ac.uk.

Chair: molly ackhurst, Birkbeck University

molly has a practice-based background having worked in sexual violence support for many years. This combines with her extensive experience as an activist, writer, and facilitator with a number of different social justice groups. All her work is rooted around creative approaches to trauma and uses emergent arts based methods to foster direct action and everyday intervention. This approach feeds into molly’s academic work and she is currently undertaking a PhD in the Birkbeck Criminology department where she looks at justice and sexual violence. More specifically, her work explores the blockages that exist around imagining more transformative ways of supporting survivors obtain justice outside the criminal “justice” system in the UK.

Panelists

Blessing Alemu was born and raised in South East London, she is the fifth child of six children. She graduated from the university of Roehampton with a 2.1 in Therapeutic Psychology, she hopes to become a qualified Psychotherapist who specialises in trauma specifically related to VAWG in the nearby future.Currently she works Women & Girls Network as Mutiple Disadvantage Advocate who provides specialist advocacy support for suriviors of gendered base violence, specifically to those from marginalised communities. Blessing’s passion to help suriviors derives from her own traumatic experiences of sexual assault. Through her faith in God and many years of therapy she has built the confidence to share her story and empower fellow suriviors with the simple message that is “there is hope after trauma”.

Elio Beale is a grassroots organiser with SWARM, Bent Bars and the London Renters Union, and co-ordinator for the Decriminalised Futures project. Elsewhere they organise, work and research around abolition, health, popular education, creative interventions for movement building, and queer and trans liberation.

Kelsey Mohammed is a feminist campaigner based in London, organising against state violence and working to explore and build transformatuve justice and community-led responses to violence, specifically addressing violence experienced by women of colour and other marginalised groups. As a facilitator with grassroots collectives she delivers trainings on bystander intervention, power and privilege, and tools for campaigning and movement building.

Sarah Lamble is Reader in Criminology & Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, teaching and researching issues of gender, sexuality and criminal justice. Lamble has been involved in community organising work around poverty, violence and prison abolition in Canada and the UK.