Survivor Designed ~ Survivor Led ~ Survivor Written
Samantha Billingham and Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie are the public faces of Our Own Words 2026
MyCWA Peer Support Group | Domestic Abuse Experts | SODA | Stronger Beginnings
Survivor led organisations working together to reach as many survivors as we can
The Survey closes on 31st March 2026
We Publish in April 2026
To get involved - link to get involved page
Not all survivors can be visible
Together our voices can be heard
This survey was built by survivors, not for them.
The people who wrote the questions, tested the language, shared the link into their own communities, and pushed for this to be done properly are not named on every page. But their fingerprints are on all of it. They decided what to ask. They decided how to ask it. They will decide what the findings mean and what needs to change.
That is not a token gesture towards survivor involvement. It is what survivor-led actually means. We are proud to have done this work alongside them. This survey was built by survivors, not for them.
The people who wrote the questions, tested the language, shared the link into their own communities, and pushed for this to be done properly are not named on every page. But their fingerprints are on all of it. They decided what to ask. They decided how to ask it. They will decide what the findings mean and what needs to change.
That is not a token gesture towards survivor involvement. It is what survivor-led actually means. We are proud to be doing this work alongside them
Meet Samantha
Samantha Billingham is a survivor, advocate, and campaigner with a focus on coercive control and institutional accountability.
She is the founder of SODA (Survivors of Domestic Abuse) and Stronger Beginnings, and the author of The ABCs of Coercive Control - a practical framework for understanding and identifying coercive control that has been adopted in training and awareness work across multiple sectors.
Samantha delivers training to professionals and organisations, with a particular emphasis on the subtle and early signs of abuse that statutory services routinely miss. She is actively campaigning for mandatory coercive control awareness training across all sectors.
Her work is rooted in a simple principle: survivors should be empowered, not managed. Institutions should be held to account, not excused.
She is co-founder of Our Own Words 2026, the UK's largest ever survivor-led survey of domestic abuse.
Meet Saskia
Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie is a survivor and one of the UK's most experienced practitioners in the domestic abuse sector. She is CEO of MyCWA (Cheshire Without Abuse), one of the longest-running domestic abuse charities in the country, and founder of Domestic Abuse Experts.
She is the author of Reframing Risk in Domestic Abuse: A Practitioner Handbook, which challenges the binary and often dangerously oversimplified approaches to risk assessment that persist across statutory and specialist services.
With over 30 years of frontline and strategic experience, Saskia works at the point where survivor evidence meets policy obligation. Her focus is on what the system owes survivors under existing law - and on closing the gap between what is promised and what is delivered.
She is co-founder of Our Own Words 2026, the UK's largest ever survivor-led survey of domestic abuse