love WITH accountability® is part of a decades-long body of survivor-centered work developed by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, whose exploration of sexual violence, accountability, and collective response began in 1994 and includes the groundbreaking film NO! The Rape Documentary.
It is a survivor-centered framework for community accountability, exploring how we respond to harm, particularly child sexual abuse, without relying on policing, punishment, or prisons.
Created by award-winning cultural worker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, love WITH accountability® centers diasporic Black survivors and focuses on radical healing and accountability. The project explores how we can disrupt and end the inhumane pandemic of child sexual abuse, humanely, while also examining how silence within families sustains a broader culture of sexual violence across religious, academic, activist, political, and professional institutions. Survivor-centered healing and accountability, without relying on policing and prisons, is love and radical justice.
Aishah’s spiritual, healing, and activist work are the foundation of love WITH accountability®. The words “Love WITH Accountability” emerged from within during one of her extended Vipassanā meditation sessions at home, and her meditation cushion became both a literal and metaphorical refuge as she faced the reality of her parents’ initial unwillingness to acknowledge their bystanding roles in her childhood sexual abuse. She could not force them to reckon, yet she continued to try, demanding accountability.
Aishah signed “Love WITH Accountability” in nearly every communication with her parents, making clear that her deep love for them could not shield or excuse their lack of accountability for the sexual violence she endured as a child, nor the subsequent thirty-year cover-up. She relied on her meditative practice, therapeutic support from a Black feminist licensed psychologist, and her cultivated community. Meditation, therapy, and community supported her in not being subsumed by trauma and suffering, and over time she learned how to work with what emerged.
About love WITH Accountability®
This understanding resonates with the teaching “No mud, no lotus,” offered by ancestor, Ven. Thích Nhất Hạnh, Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, and master teacher, who taught that without mud, the lotus flower could not grow.
Aishah officially launched love WITH accountability® in 2016, thirty-seven years after she was first sexually abused by her paternal step-grandfather. She invited an intergenerational group of twenty-nine diasporic Black cisgender women, gender non-conforming people, trans and cisgender men to join her on The Feminist Wire to explore what “love WITH accountability” looks like in the context of child sexual abuse. The group included survivors, advocates, and Aishah’s mother, who publicly acknowledged for the first time what happened and the three-decade cover-up.
Since its launch, Aishah has traveled extensively across the United States, engaging in both public and private intergenerational conversations. Through this work, she recognized the need to go more deeply beyond the online forum. As a survivor, she is unwavering in her belief that each person must choose the pathways that best support their healing, and her advocacy for alternatives to the criminal legal system is an invitation to question why calling the police is so often presented as the only response to violence.
She curated and edited the 2019 anthology love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, co-winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology. The collection brings together forty-four diasporic Black survivors and advocates who use storytelling to explore how we can disrupt and end the global epidemic of child sexual abuse without relying solely on the criminal legal system.
love WITH accountability® builds and creates healing space for diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates to draw on their lived experiences, testimonies, and work as the foundation for co-envisioning how we can eradicate childhood sexual abuse without relying on the same systems that dehumanize and brutalize Black people.
Aishah is explicit that we must practice compassionate discernment in all of our approaches to disrupting and ending this violence. Without it, we risk being consumed and becoming the very systems we seek to dismantle.
When we are accountable to ourselves, to our families, to our extended communities, and beyond, we create the conditions to center healing while working to end the inhumane, humanely.
This is the practice of love WITH accountability®.