Love with Accountability -Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Thursday Night Book club 

The words “Love WITH Accountability” emerged in 2015 through extended periods of Aishah Shahidah Simmons meditating with newfound rage about her divorced activist parents’ bystanding roles to her childhood sexual abuse 37 years prior. Meditation practice was the embodied catalyst for her love WITH accountability® praxis of responding to harm without harm. This is foundational to Simmons’ 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse.

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 childhood sexual abuse and adult rape, Aishah Shahidah Simmons…