Introduction

Survivor criminology has been described as “a gathering of voices from a heretofore distant place that stand up against these traumas.” [1] I find this description useful for three reasons.

First, it recognises the diversity of survivor experiences while speaking to their collective strength. Second, it reflects how survivors’ voices have been marginalised: when they are heard at all, they are distant, mediated through academic accounts or institutional inquiries. Third, it signals that survivor criminology is a challenge both to the harms survivors have experienced and to the structures that have traditionally excluded their voices..

The case: Britain’s Forgotten Girls

Britain’s Forgotten Girls, first broadcast on BBC2 in September 2026, examines child criminal exploitation (CCE) and child sexual exploitation (CSE) within organised crime groups and drug networks. It centres the accounts of four survivors, who describe both their exploitation and their later dealings with the justice system. Throughout, the emphasis falls on how their voices were dismissed and their experiences invalidated, despite repeated warnings over two decades.

I refer to the women as girls here because I am discussing what happened to them in childhood. They are, of course, now adult women, and no disrespect is intended.

When most people think about grooming gangs, they think of high-profile cases such as Rotherham and Rochdale. Those cases received extensive media coverage and dominated the national conversation, with much of the debate focused on the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators. That focus obscured the experiences of girls like those in the documentary, and produced a rigid, narrow picture of what CSE looks like.

The evidence had pointed elsewhere for some time. In 2012, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s Inquiry into Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups identified victims and perpetrators from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, the inquiry’s chair, Sue Berelowitz, named how blinkered the prevailing view was:

“What we know is that victims are falling through the net, when people hold fast to a position that victims are only white and perpetrators are only Asian.” [2]

Professor Carlene Firmin, co-author of the inquiry’s final report and a researcher on gang violence, has described resistance to these findings from within the discipline itself:

“There were some, particularly white male criminologists, at the time who said that this was either just fabricated or not as severe […] because if this was going on, we would have identified it already.” [3]

This remains a live issue. This year’s launch of a new Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs offers another opportunity to examine these questions, with the first tranche of national accountability hearings focusing on survivors and their families.

Survivors as objects of knowledge

The documentary shows what happens when survivors are treated as objects of knowledge rather than producers of it. A clear hierarchy of credibility emerges. Institutional knowledge, from police, social services and traditional criminology, takes precedence over survivors’ voices and lived experience.

This hierarchy produces a series of fundamental misunderstandings and mischaracterisations.

Convenient labels

The girls’ complex experiences were reduced to convenient labels that left no room for nuance and obscured their exploitation. One recalls, “I was just looked at as a troubled teenager.” Another says, “I just became that girl who, you know, was thought about as promiscuous.” [4]

Individualised risk

Risk was individualised. The girls were portrayed as choosing to put themselves into dangerous situations, which implied responsibility, even culpability, for their own exploitation. Children at risk became risk-taking children, with adultification also at play. Christine describes recounts:

“The responsibility was very much placed on Christine putting herself in bad situation with men, and I didn’t have respect for myself.” [5]

Criminalisation

The failure to understand or listen to the girls contributed to their criminalisation. They were coerced into transporting and dealing drugs through county lines networks, while being sexually exploited within those gangs’ hypermasculine culture. Yet county lines exploitation is usually understood as something that happens to boys, and this again obscures girls’ experiences.

Despite the coercion experienced, the girls were subject to criminalisation. Holly describes being arrested and prosecuted despite her known vulnerability and earlier reports of sexual abuse:

“I was told in court that I’m going to get put away for my own safety as well as what I’ve done, but it confused me cos I was like ‘why am I being punished if I’m not safe?’” [6]

A hierarchy of harms

The documentary also reveals a hierarchy of harms, in which drug offences appear to take priority over sexual violence. One girl recalls: “It was like the moment I told them about the drugs and the houses, everything shifted.” [7]

Another reported a rape involving multiple perpetrators. When she contacted police for an update, she was told they were pursuing drug charges: “You’ll hear back when there’s any information, but right now these men have got bigger fish to fry.” [8]

Denial of Justice

Together, these failures limited, and sometimes denied, the girls’ access to justice and their right to full participation in it. They were harmed first by the original offences, then again through their contact with the criminal justice system.

Their accounts show this revictimisation and retraumatisation clearly. One says, “I felt the fact that they did nothing really made me feel like it wasn’t abuse.” Another describes how it “made me carry a lot of shame, made me feel like it was my fault.” [9, 10]

Survivors as producers of knowledge

Survivor criminology turns this around. It positions survivors as producers of knowledge, whose understanding can inform responses and shape what justice might look like.

Centring lived experience could challenge the assumptions that led these crimes to be misunderstood or dismissed. It also broadens who gets to contribute to criminological knowledge, making the discipline more inclusive and more intersectional. This connects directly to Firmin’s critique of the assumption that existing criminological frameworks would have already identified these harms if they existed.

Survivor perspectives can reveal patterns that conventional approaches overlook. The intersection of child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation is a clear example: it is complex and nuanced, and survivors are best placed to explain how it starts and why it entraps. Survivor criminology can also support more trauma-informed research and responses, challenging the dismissive attitudes the documentary records.

Survivor scholars

What does survivor criminology look like in practice? The first model is the ‘survivor scholar’, described by Sardina and Ackerman: someone who combines lived experience with academic credentials and expertise. This is credentialled lived experience, and it can be powerful. As Antojado and Darley write:

“Scholarship devoid of embodied grounding is at best partial, at worst complicit in the violence and harms it purports to study.” [11]

Co-production

The second model is co-produced research, which brings survivors and academics together to develop research questions, interpret findings and shape outcomes.

In the documentary, Holly describes her works as a co-researcher with an academic at the University of Sheffield, on a project investigating the criminal exploitation of care-experienced young people, and the voice and purpose this work has given her:

“I realised, like, oh my god, I’m actually going to have a voice and I’m going to be able to actually, like, tell these people I’ve been through it and you’re not alone.” [12]

Meaningful participation of this kind can restore agency, while producing knowledge that might otherwise be missed.

Critiques and tensions

Survivor criminology also raises important questions.

Bias

One criticism concerns objectivity. If someone has personally experienced the harm they are researching, can they approach it without bias? Becker (1967) offers a counter: “We must always look at the matter from someone’s point of view.” [13] No research is entirely free from perspective.

Who gets to be a survivor?

For me, the more interesting issue is who gets recognised as a survivor, and whose voices are considered credible. Cook et al. (2022) define survival as “to continue to exist or be despite traumatic events or conditions.” [14] On that definition, the term seems straightforward.

In practice, though, “survivor” can be a loaded term. It carries expectations of recovery, resilience and having overcome adversity. There is a danger that, even within survivor criminology, we privilege an ideal survivor: one who can present their experience coherently, or in a way that fits a narrative of recovery.

Power

Even when survivors are described as research partners, power imbalances do not simply disappear. An academic researcher may still control the research agenda, while the survivor may contributes lived experience without equivalent agency, and this is something to be mindful of when building a research relationship.

Conclusion: open questions

Britain’s Forgotten Girls shows the cost of treating survivors as objects of knowledge: mislabelled, blamed, criminalised and denied justice. Survivor criminology offers a way to treat them as producers of knowledge instead. Its promise depends on how it is practiced.

Discussion prompts

1. Whose voices are heard? Does access to education, academic language or professional networks affect which survivors are recognised as credible or credentialled experts?
2. What makes involvement meaningful? What would show that survivors had actually influenced research or institutional decisions, rather than simply been consulted?
3. Where is the line? What separates lip service to victim-centred approaches from true survivor criminology?

References

[1] Cook, K.J. et al. (eds.) (2022) Survivor Criminology: A Radical Act of Hope.

[2] Oral Evidence, Home Affairs Committee. December 2012 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmhaff/68/121211.htm

[3-10] BBC Two (2026) Britain’s Forgotten Girls. First broadcast September 2026.

[11] Antojado, D. and Darley, D. (2025) ‘Introduction: Redrawing the Boundaries of Criminological Knowledge’, in Beyond Autoethnography. Routledge, pp. 1–12.

[12] Britain’s Forgotten Girls.

[13] Becker, H.S. (1967) ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, 14(3), pp. 239–247.