Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

2020 Lambda Literary Award winner for best LGBTQ anthology!

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 an award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, activist, cultural worker, and international lecturer. A child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor, she is the producer/director of the film, NO! The Rape Documentary, and the creator of the #LoveWITHAccountability Project. Simmons is a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also affiliated with the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships.

Darnell L. Moore is the head of Strategy and Programs at BreakthroughUS. His writings have been published in Ebony, Advocate, Vice, The Guardian, and MSNBC. Along with Tamura A. Lomax and Monica J. Casper, he serves as a series editor of The Feminist Wire Books. He is the author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America (Nation Books), a 2018 New York Times notable book of the year.