Being able to recognize the silence and myths that surround sexual violence enables you to break that silence and to correct those myths. By speaking out against sexual violence, we can create an environment that allows survivors to heal, holds offenders responsible for their actions, and prevents the cycle of abuse from continuing.

The Survivors' Movement welcomes both survivors and allies, working to combat sexual as well as other forms of abuse, including domestic violence and verbal/psychological abuse. Joining the Survivors' Movement can entail many different aspects of prevention and education. Two new ways the movement is looking at CSA is through the lens of human rights and public health. In the human rights view, it takes stigmatization away from the individual and examines trends of torture and oppression, looking at solutions across many communities. Organizations within this focus have tapped into various anti-oppression/torture organizations, including Amnesty International. A public health approach allows activists to focus on the ways that CSA directly impacts the entire community. It also looks at CSA as an issue that can be stopped through preventative measures. This allows for governmental organizations like the Center for Disease Control to be involved. Additionally, these are reflective of the ways  in which the Survivors' Movement has become more community-focused and more politicized, adapting to the needs of individual groups and members--and as a result, less about the needs of white, middle-class lesbians. 

The visibility of the Survivors' Movement has led to a backlash, with organizations such as VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or FMS. VOCAL was established in 1984 in Minneapolis to advocate the rights of those accused in CSA cases. They promote the claim that children's allegations of sexual abuse are often false, and that children do not make credible witnesses. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was started as a movement to discredit those survivors who, as adults, have recovered memories of childhood abuse. This organization is steeped in controversy, including the fact that their original board consisted entirely of people accused of abusing their own children. However, they have made many gains in discrediting adult survivors (and the survivors' movement in general) and have recently (1999) begun a campaign to discredit children. Additionally, the backlash has created a "new tactic" used against children disclosing abuse. They claim that a protective parent implanted the memories of the abuse by another parent, relative, or other adult, thereby "forcing" the involvement of the child to fulfill a personal vendetta that the protective parent holds against the accused person. Another way that the backlash works is by maintaining the outdated belief that the statistics for CSA and incest are actually very low, and that the Survivors' Movement is just another feminist attack on men.

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