The Flying Child CIC: Response to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Position Statement on Non-Recent Child Sexual Abuse

27 August 2026

The Flying Child welcomes the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ position statement, Addressing the impact of non-recent child sexual abuse on the mental health of adults, and in particular, its acknowledgement that survivors of child sexual abuse have experienced avoidable harm within mental health services.

The statement recognises that survivors have experienced re-traumatisation when disclosing abuse, misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment and care planning, and inadequate access to support. It also acknowledges that harm can arise through what is considered normal or accepted practice, through insufficient training and awareness, and through systems and structures that prevent genuinely holistic care. www.rcpsych.ac.uk⁠

The Flying Child has always maintained that victim/survivors don’t necessarily disclose sexual abuse in words. Distress is often communicated through the body, behaviour, relationships and ways of surviving, and these signs can continue long into adulthood. Too often, systems respond to what they can see without considering what may have happened to cause the person’s distress, having the confidence and skills to ask sensitively where appropriate, or knowing how to respond to disclosure in a trauma-informed way.

“The words used to describe me - the disorders they said I had - were professional  judgements made with no context. With no story. They were labels that allowed them to place me somehow, in society. To make sense of me. But they were labels that silenced the story. That silenced the truth of Child Sexual Abuse." 

Sophie Olson, The Tavistock Trauma Service External Lectures on Trauma 2025

Sophie Olson, The Flying Child CIC founder, and member of the CSA Network for CHANGE, describes her experience in these terms: She was communicating that she had been abused through her body, behaviour and ways of surviving, yet those signs were misunderstood, misinterpreted and pathologised from childhood onwards by systems focused on ‘symptoms’ rather than underlying causes. Her experience is far from unique. (The Flying Child⁠)

For this reason, we are encouraged by the Royal College’s recognition that survivors can be made to feel that the difficulties they experience are somehow inherent within them, rather than understandable responses to what happened to them. We welcome its examination of diagnostic overshadowing, inappropriate diagnosis, restrictive practice and other forms of iatrogenic harm.

A person who has survived child sexual abuse should not enter a service they turn to for support, carrying shame for what was done to them, only to leave carrying additional shame for how they learned to survive, and a diagnosis must never become a substitute for professional curiosity, understanding and support.

Systems must be conducive to disclosure, but not rely on it - as finding the words, especially for those who have suffered, not just sexual harm in childhood, but institutional harm from a system ill-equipped to support, can feel impossible. We therefore strongly support the College’s emphasis on compassionate therapeutic relationships and trauma-informed care, and its recognition that disclosure is not a single event but a process that depends upon safety, trust and the response of the person listening.

Of particular importance is the College’s commitment to developing training for psychiatrists and practitioners, co-produced with patients and survivors. It has identified training needs that include facilitating disclosure, providing non-stigmatising support, developing compassionate relational care, understanding the centrality of traumatic experience, using language that reduces the risk of re-traumatisation, and embedding trauma-informed principles within practice.

This closely reflects what The Flying Child has been advocating through our survivor-designed and co-presented, Side By Side CSA training: lived experience must sit alongside professional expertise.

Professionals cannot be expected to respond confidently to child sexual abuse if they have never been given the opportunity to understand its complexity or safely explore their own response to what is understandably, a challenging topic. Professional discomfort, uncertainty and fear can become barriers to recognition and compassionate response. Training must therefore go beyond policy, procedure and diagnostic criteria. It must help practitioners understand what child sexual abuse can look like across a lifetime, how trauma can present without verbal disclosure, and how their own language, assumptions and responses can either create safety or compound harm. 

We must also recognise the additional pressures placed on survivors working within the mental health sector, and ensure that appropriate support is available to them. Lived experience should not be treated as a deficit, vulnerability or professional weakness. It can bring depth of understanding, insight, empathy, critical awareness and expertise that strengthen practice, leadership and service design. Attitudes that frame survivor identity primarily through risk, fragility or limitation can themselves be stigmatising and harmful. Expecting people to support others while failing to recognise both the strengths and the impact of their own lived experience is neither sustainable nor consistent with trauma-responsive practice. (The Flying Child⁠)

The Royal College’s recognition of survivor partnership in research and service development is equally significant. Survivors should not simply be consulted after systems have already been designed. They should be equal partners in shaping the services intended to support them. (www.rcpsych.ac.uk⁠)

But most importantly, publication of a position statement cannot, in itself, create the change survivors need. The test , following this statement, is implementation.

‘Trauma-informed care’ cannot become another catchphrase displayed in strategies while survivors continue to encounter services that are fragmented, diagnosis-led, inaccessible or insufficiently equipped to recognise child sexual abuse.

Co-production cannot mean inviting survivors to repeatedly recount painful experiences whilst decision-making power remains elsewhere, with ‘lived-experience’ isolated to focus/ lived experience groups that remain unnamed, or lack credit in formal publication, regardless of whether those involved choose to remain anonymous.

Training cannot be optional, peripheral or dependent upon the enthusiasm of individual practitioners taking on the role of activists within their respective field. 

And acknowledgement of iatrogenic harm must lead to examination of the practices, cultures and structures that continue to produce it.

We therefore believe that the recommendations within this statement should lead to measurable change across mental health services, including:

• Properly supported and appropriately remunerated survivor involvement in the design, delivery and evaluation of services and training, (with caution against tokenistic or extractive approaches to lived-experience involvement, in which survivors are valued primarily for their personal testimony rather than recognised as whole people who may also bring professional expertise, leadership, organisational knowledge and independent perspectives. Survivor involvement must not require people to diminish or compartmentalise legitimate parts of their identity in order to participate).

  
  

• Mandatory child sexual abuse and trauma-responsive training across mental health professions, co-designed and delivered with people with lived experience;

  
  

• Greater professional understanding of the many ways children and adults communicate trauma without making an explicit verbal disclosure;

  
  

• Practices that ask not only “What is wrong with this person?” but also “What has happened, and what does this person need to feel safe?”;

  
  

• Scrutiny of diagnostic and restrictive practices that may pathologise survival responses or reproduce dynamics of powerlessness and control;

  
  

• Continuity and relational safety within services, recognising that trust cannot be demanded from survivors but must be earned;

  
  

• Accessible pathways to appropriate, specialist and long-term support where this is needed;

  
  
  
  

We would like to thank those who played a key role in the development of the statement, with particular thanks and gratitude to the survivors who contributed. Lived-experience involvement in work of this nature carries an emotional cost, and the College itself acknowledges shortcomings in how survivors were engaged during the development of the statement. Its commitment to learn from this is important. ⁠

The responsibility now sits with systems and professionals to listen and to act because for too long, child sexual abuse has remained hidden in plain sight, while many of its consequences have been treated in isolation from their cause. We hope this statement marks a movement away from asking survivors to fit themselves into systems, and towards creating systems capable of seeing and responding to the whole person.

The impacts of child sexual abuse do not end with childhood. Mental health services must be equipped to recognise these impacts, respond with compassion, and to ensure that seeking help does not cause further harm.

The Flying Child CIC

Society’s Shame, Not Mine.

You can read the RCPsych Position Statement here.

Please visit Theflyingchild.com for further information about our co-produced and delivered Side by Side CSA, training for professionals in all fields, working with survivors of non-recent child sexual abuse.