Foreword
This year All Survivors Project celebrated seven years since we first formed as a research project housed in UCLA School of Law. Over this period, we have seen positive changes and growing recognition of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Yet sadly the work that we do is needed now more than ever before. In many situations of armed conflict, the victimisation of men and boys continues to be overlooked.
This report presents the work that ASP delivered in 2023 and the impact that we were able to achieve. Throughout the year, we continued to work directly with victims/survivors to build multi-pronged interventions that prioritised access to health, justice and direct support. In Colombia, we strengthened our existing work to achieve gender-inclusive justice processes for victims/survivors. We continued to implement our multi-country project on survivor-centred access to health in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Colombia. This included finalising and applying the outcomes of ground-breaking research, providing capacity building for healthcare workers, and guiding humanitarian actors on integrating our findings into their programmes. Our work with victims/survivors also developed into a model of “direct support” through which we enabled dozens of individuals to access healthcare, seek justice, and advocate for their rights.
We continued to implement an intersectional approach in our work, paying close attention to the issue of age-related vulnerabilities and gained a deepened understanding of the specific risks boys face to sexual violence in the context of armed conflicts. We were honoured to continue this work as an implementing partner of the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG CAAC). Through this partnership, we initiated new research in Colombia. We also engaged child protection actors in discussions on previous research findings in the CAR and undertook a preliminary scoping exercise for future research in Nigeria. As we extended our focus on boys as Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups (CAAFAG) from CAR to Colombia and Nigeria, we forged new alliances with child protection actors globally and disseminated our research findings to international audiences.
In addition to our country specific and thematic work, we continued to engage with other key actors working on CRSV, sharing our insights, technical guidance, and providing training on preventing and responding to CRSV against men and boys. In doing so, we contributed to ongoing processes and policy discussions, helping ensure that this issue is not overlooked in the future.
All our work was conducted with ethical rigour and integrity while working in extremely challenging contexts. As our independent external evaluation this year noted, ASP “puts a high value on ensuring respect for and acknowledgment of national knowledge, stakeholders and practices, something that is all too often overlooked within the sector. This speaks not only to its effectiveness and impact, but also to its coherence and sustainability: its national-level partnerships are a critical component to joining up individual survivors to wider policy discussions that often remain abstract and divorced from the context.”
We would not have been able to do any of our work without the deep trust that victims/survivors and our partners place in us. I am deeply grateful to my inspiring team who work with unstinting commitment and demonstrate the highest level of care for the work. Last but not least, none of this work would have been possible without our generous donors whose support ensures that we continue to deliver our mission. With their support, we move forward determined to ensure that all survivors receive the care, justice and recognition they deserve.
Charu Lata Hogg
Founder and Executive Director
All Survivors Project
Please see full report for more information.
