About

While the US Centers for Disease Control estimates 20% of all adults (1 in 4 assigned female-at-birth and 1 in 6 assigned-male-at-birth people) experience rape or sexual assault by an older child or adult by age 18, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests gender non-conforming children may be at even greater risk. Additionally, a 2011 study of more than 1,000 transgender people found over 50% experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives. Of those who were adult sexual violence survivors, 72% had also survived child sexual abuse.  

This project uses storytelling and survivor leadership to illuminate the needs and  wisdom of survivors at this vulnerable intersection, in service of co-creating the answer  to the question: “What would have to be true for no child to ever be raped or sexually  assaulted again?”

Our Values & Commitments 

Our work is inherently intersectional, following the leadership and prioritizing the needs of survivors who have been most harmed by systemic, historical, and cultural violence in the United States. We are committed to building a world in which Black and  Indigenous gender non-conforming children (and therefore all children) are loved,  protected, and cherished, and in which their wisdom, autonomy, and humanity are respected. Given the well-documented history and legacy of state violence against these children and their communities, we are an abolitionist organization, committed to building safety and support through relational networks and cultural change, not through prisons, policing, or state-run psychiatric institutions. Knowing child sexual abuse and rape culture will not be fully eradicated in this lifetime, our work is intergenerational, with a commitment to intentionally involve youth and young adults in the leadership and development of our organization. 

Our History & Structure 

Mirror Memoirs was founded by nationally recognized survivor activist Amita Swadhin in  January 2016, when they received a fellowship from the Just Beginnings Collaborative  (launched by the NoVo Foundation). In February 2019, we received fiscal sponsorship from Community Partners, a non-profit in Los Angeles that supports over 150 emerging projects. In December 2020, Jaden Fields became Co-Executive Director, after three years of shaping the project as a Core Member. In October 2023, Bilen Berhanu joined as Operations Director; she was the second survivor to record her story in our audio archive seven years prior. 

Our Board is comprised entirely of transgender, intersex, non-binary, and/or queer people of color who survived child sexual abuse, with a commitment to reserve 75% of  Board seats for survivors who are Two Spirit, transgender, intersex, or non-binary. 55%  of our Board members have shared their stories through our audio archive or theater project. 

We engage survivors in our core demographic through one-on-one interviews for our audio archive, healing circles, political education programming (including cohort-based leadership institutes and one-time panels and workshops), and our monthly Member  Support meetings. Members may qualify to be paid as workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on behalf of Mirror Memoirs by attending a leadership institute. As of May  2024, over 700 QTIBIPOC child sexual abuse survivors have opted in as Members.  

Accomplices beyond our core demographic are invited to help us raise awareness and funding and advise our strategic plan and organizational development by joining our  Leadership Council (which includes a give-and-get commitment and committee service).  Accomplices are also welcome to join our Abolition Book Club and film screenings,  panels, convenings, and healing circles each year. Over 2,000 people have opted in as  Accomplices by joining our mailing list, completing our member survey, and/or attending an event. 

Key Program Components & Accomplishments 

Knowledge Production  

The foundation of our programming is our audio archive of stories from LGBTQI+  people of color who survived child sexual abuse. From 2016 through 2018, our Founding Co-Director recorded interviews with 60 survivors across 15 states in the US. In September 2018, with support from Dartmouth College and the Northwest Network,  we assembled a team of seven transgender, non-binary, and intersex Mirror Memoirs members to begin coding our initial audio archive into data. Coding was done using  Atlas TI software, an academic research tool. All researchers were paid for their work.  This initial archive reveals a collective narrative largely untold in mainstream media,  even during the post-#MeToo era. 

Our storytellers are 42% Black, 37% Latinx, 10% Indigenous, and 31% Asian or  Pacific Islander (percentages higher than 100 due to mixed-race survivors.) 

9% were raped or sexually assaulted by a cisgender woman. 

70% of our storytellers are transgender, non-binary, or intersex. 

Those survivors who grew up to identify as transgender women had multiple perpetrators across a broader period (into adulthood) and at much higher rates than survivors of other gender identities.  

As children, many of our storytellers were sexually assaulted in mental health hospitals, by the police, and/or in foster care, revealing a failure of our current social safety net to protect survivors at the intersections of oppression.  

100% shared their personal vision for how humanity can end child sexual abuse – almost none named police or prisons as a solution. Instead, survivors noted the desire to be believed and supported in their healing, including having basic needs like housing, food, and healthcare met, and access to culturally relevant therapy, body-based healing technologies (e.g. acupuncture, massage,  herbalism, etc.), music and art, and a supportive community of peers. 

Our initial archive release was paused due to the COVID pandemic, but production has resumed, and these stories will be publicly shared from Summer 2024 through Fall  2025. From 2021-2022, we partnered with RALIANCE to expand our audio archive, recording another 13 stories from transgender, non-binary, or intersex survivors who competed in  K-12 sports, in service of creating a counter-narrative to the bills being passed or proposed in state legislatures criminalizing gender-affirming healthcare for transgender children and banning transgender girls from competing in K-12 or collegiate sports.  These stories have been coded by a researcher on our team and findings will be released as a toolkit in 2025.

Arts-Based Narrative Change 

Mirror Memoirs’ work has always been rooted in the arts, through storytelling and collaborations with multimedia artists, given our Founding Co-Director’s background in theater (as co-creator of the Secret Survivors project with Ping Chong + Co. in New York City from 2009 to 2012) and radio production (as co-host of Flip the Script on KPFK from 2009 to 2014), and both of our Co-Directors’ work as writers and performance poets.  

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in November 2021 we filmed a work-in-progress theater performance, “Transmutation: A Ceremony,” in partnership with the California  LGBT Arts Alliance, and have since virtually shared the pre-recorded performance with over 1,500 audience members. In 2024, we will host a number of in-person and virtual screenings, raising funds to stage full-scale live theater productions in Los Angeles and  New York City in 2025. 

Our archive release will include photo collages by Mer Young of our publicly known storytellers, illustrations by Don Keita Azu and Wriply Bennet of our anonymous storytellers, and music by Juliette Jones of Rootstock Republic. We will also release a series of multimedia (audio, print, and video) toolkits to support individual survivors,  educators, community organizers, and healing justice practitioners, with art and animation by BIPOC LGBTQI+ visual artists. 

Once funding allows, we plan to create an in-person multi-media art exhibit,  performance, and healing circle series stemming from the archive. We hope to tour this ensemble across the United States. We also hope to commission animated videos of some of the stories in our archive.

Member Support  

Mirror Memoirs aims to help survivors in our community, most of whom have not had support to process their childhood trauma and heal through collective storytelling and community building. Mirror Memoirs has hosted three national and two regional convenings for LGBTQI+ people of color who survived child sexual abuse, with over 200  survivors attending in total. Convenings have incorporated somatic healing practices, story sharing, listening sessions using excerpts from our audio archive, and workshops on breaking the cycle of sexual violence in our families and communities. Local healing practitioners have also attended to provide their services at low-or-no cost to participants. We have collected surveys from our attendees, informing our future practices and strategic priorities.  

During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we expanded our programming to include monthly virtual member meetings, inviting members to deepen relationships in service of sharing both emotional support and political analysis, while engaging in healing justice practices and workshops, and book readings to strengthen our skills to move in line the values of transformative justice and disability justice. We also launched a Member Support Fund, raising funds from our accomplices and redistributing them to our BIPOC Two Spirit, transgender, non-binary, and intersex members in the form of  $500 micro-grants (210 grants totaling $105,000 were awarded from 2021-2022). 

From 2024 through 2025, we are continuing our virtual monthly member meetings, while hosting in-person events in some of our largest member hubs (e.g. Los Angeles, New  York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago). We are also continuing the Somatic  Accountability practice cohort we launched in 2023, under the guidance of our community member Daria Garina (founder of Accountability Mapping). This virtual space strengthens our members’ abilities to deepen relationships with one another through conflict, avoiding a shame response when unintentional harm happens, and instead leaning into a collective practice of loving accountability and collective care. 

From 2024 through 2025, we are also supporting all the survivor storytellers in our audio archive and theater project as these stories become public. In Fall 2024, we will convene 50 of our storytellers in Los Angeles to meet one another, form peer support pods, and receive training on how to discuss child sexual abuse as a social justice and public health issue, and how to ask for and give peer care in times of crisis while remaining boundaried and grounded. We are also providing digital security support to our storytellers, especially those who have chosen to be public in our archive and theater project, courtesy of Jack Aponte and Tall Poppy.

Leadership Development  

Mirror Memoirs is, in part, a social enterprise to create paid leadership opportunities as keynote speakers, trainers, facilitators, policy advocates, researchers, curriculum writers, and organizational development practitioners for transgender, non-binary, and intersex survivors of color (particularly those who are Black, Indigenous and/or Latinx)  who are historically unemployed or underemployed.  

Thus far, Mirror Memoirs has created these opportunities through our Board membership, and consulting and public speaking opportunities with universities,  nonprofit organizations, and government agencies throughout the country. Over 50 people in our base have been paid for Mirror Memoirs work, and we expect this number to increase as we launch our cohort-based leadership institutes. 

In October 2019, we piloted a five-day leadership institute in Oakland, CA for 10 of our  Core Members (QTIBIPOC child sexual abuse survivors). Content included: relationship building, a deep dive into our core values and key organizational practices, and a train-the-trainer module preparing folks to become fluent in presenting Mirror Memoirs 101  and 201 workshops and keynotes externally. We had planned to replicate this institute in New York City and Los Angeles in early 2020 but pivoted to a virtual model due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

We have also realized the need for a tiered leadership development model, and are  now creating:  

A nine-month training institute (including an in-person retreat) in which Core  Members become facilitators of emerging place-based Mirror Memoirs chapters  (which our members have asked us to develop) and/or integrate work to end child sexual abuse into their ongoing community organizing and healing justice work. In 2025, we will launch a leadership institute specifically for Black Core  Members in our base, with a subsequent institute open to all Core Members in  2026. 

A three-to-six-month training institute in which Accomplice Members (those who are not QTIBIPOC child sexual abuse survivors) and organizations serving survivors and/or BIPOC LGBTQI people can learn the Mirror Memoirs analysis and approach to ending child sexual abuse, heal from the violence of rape culture in community, and receive guidance to begin addressing and preventing child sexual abuse and supporting the survivors in their communities. This tier will launch in 2026.

Survivor-Led Advocacy & Training  

Mirror Memoirs seeks to increase public knowledge about the global pandemic of child sexual abuse, and especially about the failure of current systems and institutions to foster the healing and wellness of all survivors. Through the strategy sessions at our national convenings, our membership meetings, and the collective recommendations emerging from our audio archive, we are crafting a vision for a world without rape, and a policy platform to help vulnerable survivors heal and thrive in the here and now, even as we work toward that long-term vision.  Since our launch, our team has delivered over 150 keynotes, trainings, and webinars through colleges, conferences, and community-based organizations nationwide. Our audiences have included direct service providers, philanthropists, social justice advocates, and policymakers.  

Our policy advocacy work has grown since we became a fiscally-sponsored organization in 2019. Our Co-Director Jaden Fields was a 2019 Solis Policy Institute  Fellow at the CA Women’s Foundation, where he helped pass AB124, the Justice for  Survivors Act, requiring the trauma history of survivors who have been accused of harm to be taken into account during sentencing processes. We are also a member organization of the CA Transgender, Gender Non-conforming and Intersex Policy  Alliance, which successfully advocated for AB2218, creating the Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund, and the #InvestInTransLives coalition, calling for a more equitable investment from institutional funders into transgender and non-binary-led social change organizations (especially those with BIPOC leadership). In 2024, we are advocating for the passage of a Los Angeles City Transgender Wellness & Equity Fund. In 2025, we will share the initial findings and implications from our audio archive via a series of panels and convenings in Los Angeles, New York City, and virtually. We will also begin planning our 10^th Anniversary Conference, to be held in Fall 2026 with approximately 200 survivors, advocates, and accomplices from across the US attending in person, and a larger number attending virtually.