The wait survivors of child sexual abuse still face

After ten years, someone finally asked one survivor a straightforward question.

"She simply asked, 'Is there something troubling you from your childhood we can talk about?'" the survivor recalled. "Ten years in mental health services, and she was the first to ask."

That single recollection sits at the centre of a substantial new piece of research by Knowing Works CIC together with Survivors in Transition, the Ipswich charity based on Fore Street. Focus on Survivors 2025 draws on the responses of 243 adult survivors of child sexual abuse, collected between 29 September 2025 and 13 February 2026, and compares them directly against a survey the charity first ran a decade ago. The two organisations describe it as the only comprehensive ten-year comparison of adult survivors' experiences in the UK.

The headline finding is progress. More survivors are disclosing, reporting and getting help than in 2015. The finding underneath it is the wait.

A childhood, and then some

Survivors told the 2025 survey that an average of 15 years passed between their abuse beginning and their first access to support services. In 2015 the figure was 20 years.

Behind that average sits a very wide spread. The largest group, 29%, sought support within five years, including 7% who did so in the same year the abuse began. But 14% waited between 20 and 29 years, 12% waited between 30 and 39 years, and 5% waited more than 40 years before reaching out.

The abuse itself typically began very early. Most survivors, 67%, were younger than 11 when they were first abused, and 30% were aged five or under. The average duration was seven years, unchanged from 2015, and the report identifies a pattern it also found a decade ago: the younger the child, the longer the abuse continued. Survivors abused from the age of five or under reported an average duration of 11 years.

Disclosure came later still. Almost half of survivors, 49%, told nobody until they were 20 or older. A quarter first disclosed between the ages of 11 and 15.

Nobody asked

The report is blunt about where the burden of disclosure falls. Of those who had told someone, 82% chose to disclose on their own. Only 18% were ever asked directly.

The picture is much the same as it was in 2015. When survivors did speak, they most often spoke to people close to them: parents (17%), a friend who was also a child at the time (16%), or a partner (15%). Counsellors were told by 17%. Doctors were told by 10%, teachers by 7% and police by 7%. Not one respondent reported disclosing to a helpline.

Some survivors said the way they were treated shaped how much they felt able to say.

"They were not trauma-informed," one explained. "If the experience had been different, and they were trained to understand that often people only initially share the tip of the iceberg, then maybe I would have felt able to share more about other incidents which could have resulted in more of an outcome for them."

Others did not have the words at the time. "Until I was an adult with children of my own, I had never realised that what had happened to me was abuse," one survivor said. Another described giving professionals enough to act on without ever making a formal disclosure: "I imparted information that should have been acted on, but it was not an intentioned disclosure."

Men waited longest. Just under a third of male survivors, 28%, first sought support between 20 and 29 years after the abuse, compared with 11% of women. A further 13% of men waited more than 40 years, against 4% of women. The report notes that its male sample is small and that these figures should be read with caution, but it points to existing research linking the gap to stereotypes around male victimhood.

What has actually improved

The ten-year comparison is not a catalogue of failure, and the report does not present it as one.

Nearly three-quarters of survivors, 74%, had accessed support, up from 66% in 2015. Half had reported to the police, up from 30%. Use of independent sexual violence advisers rose from 6% to 36%, and use of voluntary sexual abuse services from 44% to 79%. The proportion who said they felt heard in a hospital A&E department climbed from 34% to 59%.

Survivors in Transition lists five things it believes have improved: more reporting, more people reaching out, more use of multiple services, more access to long-term support, and growing willingness to seek help. Almost half of respondents, 45%, felt support had got better over the past decade, though 17% thought it had got worse.

Kate Davies CBE, national director for health and justice, armed forces, migrant health and sexual assault services at NHS England, writes in the report's foreword that the original 2015 study "challenged many of the assumptions held across health and care systems". She describes the rise in survivors coming forward as encouraging, while setting out the challenge it creates.

"Increased disclosures and demand must be matched by an equally strong commitment to ensuring that every point of contact with health services is trauma-informed, responsive and connected to specialist support," she writes. A survivor's first disclosure, she adds, "is a pivotal moment that shapes how survivors engage with services going forward".

Then the waiting starts again

For many survivors, reaching a service is not the end of the delay.

Some 61% of respondents had used four or more services. More than 60% of those who received support had it for longer than a year, and 24% for more than six years. Yet a third of survivors disagreed that they could easily find information online about what was available, and 37% said they could not find enough information about support for their specific needs.

The comments describe a system that is hard to get into and hard to stay in. One survivor described access as a "postcode lottery". Another set out the loop they were caught in: "Local voluntary sector is difficult to access - long waiting times for their therapy (over 3 years) yet you must have been through their therapy service to access any of their other services e.g. peer support, leaves survivors with no support whilst waiting."

Where support was reached, its length was often the problem. "In my experience of NHS specialist services, you are very lucky to get six months of treatment," one survivor wrote. "But this is nowhere near long enough to develop trust with the therapist and then talk about 17 years of childhood sexual abuse, violence and neglect."

Another put it more starkly: "It is already exhausting surviving, then you have to navigate systems that feel stacked against you. Whilst feeling unworthy of it."

What the report asks for

Focus on Survivors 2025 sets out what it calls survivors' mandates to different parts of the system, drawn from the findings.

To the NHS: "Stop waiting for survivors to disclose. Simply - Ask. Listen. Validate. Refer."

To commissioners and funders: "Stop commissioning services as if recovery has an end date. Fund recovery for as long as recovery takes."

The report asks health services to treat child sexual abuse as a lifelong health inequality, and to create environments where professionals routinely ask, respond safely and refer confidently. It asks commissioners to treat specialist voluntary sector services as essential infrastructure rather than optional provision. Its own authors are careful about how far the numbers can be pushed: the survey is a snapshot, not a statistically representative sample, and because respondents were largely recruited through support organisations, survivors who have never disclosed or sought help are likely to be under-represented.

The financial argument has been made separately. A 2023 report in the same series, examining the cost to the NHS of delayed, denied and disbelieved disclosures, estimated the total lifetime health-related economic burden of child sexual abuse across England and Wales at almost £3bn a year, with the highest costs incurred before survivors disclosed at all.

The strongest case, though, is made by survivors themselves. Asked which finding stood out most, one survivor picked the wait.

"'Survivors waited 15 years' - this saddened me to think of survivors 'suffering in silence' for so long."

The bottom line

Ten years of evidence shows a system that has got better at receiving survivors but no better at reaching them. The average wait has fallen by five years, which is progress, but it still means most survivors spend a decade and a half carrying this on their own before anyone helps. Four in five had to raise it themselves. The report's ask of the professionals who meet survivors every day, in surgeries, classrooms, custody suites and maternity wards, amounts to one sentence: be the first to ask.

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, Survivors in Transition can be contacted on 01473 232499 or at support@survivorsintransition.co.uk. The Rape Crisis 24/7 support line is 0800 500 2222.

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