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Veterans of the user‐survivor movement, Peter Campbell and Andrew Roberts, profile the Survivors' History Group, a network of approximately 100 members across the UK and Ireland, who believe that the history of individual and collective action by service users/survivors is both interesting and important, and worthy of preservation.

In this chapter, the author critically examines the relationship between sociology and the identities/experiences of disability and ‘mental illness’ (referred to throughout as distress). The author argues that despite sociology having an ethos of social justice and frequently producing critical accounts of inequalities – such as anti-racism and gender equality – it nonetheless uncritically reiterates the marginalisation of disability and distress. As such, sociology not only reflects the increasing ‘medicalisation of everyday life’ and shores up the essentialist discourses of genetics and neuroscience, but also consigns research and knowledge production about disability and distress to the medical sciences. The author challenges these sociological conventions and highlights the ways in which both disability and distress are socially structured, embodied experiences. The author argues that a sociological account of distress and disability are important not only in and of themselves, but also because they highlight the ways and means to challenge essentialism, inequality and the ever-narrowing definition of what is considered a normal or acceptable part of human experience. Furthermore, vibrant streams of user-led research, activism and practice-interventions – resulting in widespread social, legal and identity transformations – have emerged from the experiences of disability and distress. These user-led perspectives highlight the importance and potential of knowledge produced from the margins, not only for those experiencing disability and/or distress but also for the ways in which we perceive, theorise and research the social world more broadly.

Purpose: To examine empirical patterns of participation of allied groups in disability protests from 1970 to 2016 in the United States.

Methods/approach: Uses event history to analyze 1,268 cases of disability protests quantitatively. Internal and external allied groups and types of individual protestors are analyzed over the entire period and by decade.

Findings: Multiple impairment, single issue organizations were a more common type of “internal” ally than were either single impairment, multiple issue organizations or multiple impairment, multiple issue (truly cross-disability) organizations. External ally groups with a wide range of concerns were less common than internal ally groups but were most represented during the 1990s. Veterans groups were the most common type of external ally, while parents were the most common type of individual allies.

Implications/values: Two topics need more attention: How ally participation in disability protests compares to that in protests in other social movements, and what types of changes over time emerge. Explanations relating to movement trajectories and other social movement characteristics are presented, and the need for a more nuanced conceptualization of protest allies is discussed.

The leadership of people with lived experience of mental health problems is underdeveloped, when it comes to leadership in one's own recovery, at the service level, and at the systemic level. Unlike the mental health system, the user/survivor movement has a values base of empowerment and equality. But the movement has not yet created an explicit model of leadership based on these values. Conventional models of leadership have little to offer but critiques of it provide a good framework for users and survivors to build its own model of leadership upon. If user/survivor leadership is to thrive, new roles, practices and competencies need to be developed. At a deeper level, there needs to be philosophical, psychological and political shifts in service systems if user/survivor leadership is to ever take root. Furthermore, the leadership of empowerment and equality should pervade all the leadership in service systems and beyond.

Conflict-related sexual violence, primarily affecting women, has become synonymous with the notion that stigmatization and dominant male power relations lead to the suppression of female voices when speaking about their experiences. Yet theories around empowerment argue that the resilience and strength of survivors not only helps them to deal with the harm they have suffered, but also encourages them to become leaders and mobilize others within their communities who have suffered similar fates.

A platform must exist that can facilitate and promote the efforts of survivors who are actively engaged in bringing about change. One means to achieve such a goal is to provide those who have been victimized with a mechanism to connect, share experiences, and engage in advocacy in large groups. SEMA: The Global Network of Victims and Survivors to End Wartime Sexual Violence represents one such platform that supports women in making a change on a number of issues. This chapter will discuss the stigma faced by women and girls, the benefits of a global survivor network that thrives on leadership, and the impact such an initiative may have on reparations.

SEMA and its focus on reparations is both influenced by and influences survivor leaders, who entail a crucial part of decision-making. Through its survivor-led core, SEMA ensures that the voices that can bring about the most change are made central, and the strength of women is reinforced.

This is an important time to be taking stock of mental health service user/survivor campaigning and involvement. Big changes are taking place in social care. These will also impact on developments taking place in mental health services, with the plan to trial personal budgets in the National Health Services announced in Lord Darzi's report in July 2008. This article details the past, present and future of the survivor movement from Peter Beresford's personal point of view.

Discriminatory attitudes to (ex) service users may threaten modernisation as they limit and shrink the workforce and prevent committed workers from succeeding. The report of the 1st National Conference of Survivor Workers gives senior managers the knowledge needed to increase the size and capability of the workforce.

This chapter introduces a conceptual schema with which the authors chart the historical trajectory of four realms of feminist antiviolence efforts in the United States, describing strains and tensions between and within each realm, with a particular focus on the efficacy of violence prevention.

We draw on feminist theory and empirical studies of antiviolence efforts as well as our own interview and ethnographic research into violence prevention.

This chapter charts a four-part schema for understanding the trajectory of feminist engagements with violence against women. It theorizes that the segmentation of feminist antiviolence has given rise to a variety of tensions within realms that could be resolved or mitigated by reconnecting the realms.

In the face of growing objections to their handling of sexual assault and other forms of gender-based violence, the military, colleges, and other institutions have touted their violence prevention programs. While these programs serve as a testament to over forty years of feminist efforts to institutionalized antiviolence policies and practices, without a holistic feminist approach, violence prevention functions as little more than public relations.

The chapter is of use for scholars thinking about violence against women and gender-based violence, as well as institutions that set policy around issues of violence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine 2,102 #MeToo tweets and focuses on the content of the tweets and social reactions to these tweets. For a subsample of 912 tweets that included disclosures of sexual assault or harassment, the incident type and context, along with coping were also examined.

#MeToo tweets were retrieved from a 24 h time period immediately after the initial tweet prompting responses. Both sentiment analysis and content and context analyses were performed.

Although the overall sentiment of tweets indicated a negative tone, the majority of positive social reactions indicated validation and belief of survivors, offered emotional support and called for social change. Targets who disclosed generally described workplace harassment and assertive coping responses.

Sentiment analysis can be limited given a lack of context. Not all targets using #MeToo shared details of their harassment or assault; those who did reported using more assertive coping responses than traditional samples of survivors.

Social media platforms offer unique opportunities for targets to share personal stories and receive emotional and social support they may not have access in-person.

#MeToo provided targets with a groundswell of social and emotional support, along with a less frequent amount of backlash against the movement.

A multimethod approach was used with both sentiment analysis and text coding to examine #MeToo, allowing for a description of types of incidents shared, coping strategies and social reactions.

Disabled women are reported to be between twice and five times more likely to experience sexual violence than non-disabled women or disabled men; when these are hate crimes they compound harms for both victims and communities.

This user-led research explores how disabled and Deaf victims and Survivors most effectively resist the harm and injustice they experience after experiencing disablist hate crime involving rape.

Feminist standpoint methods are employed with reciprocity as central. This small-scale peer research was undertaken with University ethics and supervision over a five year period. Subjects (n=522) consisted of disabled and Deaf victims and Survivors in North of England.

The intersectional nature of violence against disabled women unsettles constructed macro binaries of public/private space violence and the location of disabled women as inherently vulnerable. Findings demonstrate how seizing collective identity can usefully resist re-victimization, tackle the harms after disablist hate crime involving rape and resist the homogenization of both women and disabled people.

The chapter outlines inequalities in disabled people’s human rights and recommends service and policy improvements, as well as informing methods for conducting ethical research.

This is perhaps the first user-led, social model based feminist standpoint research to explore the collective resistance to harm after experiencing disablist hate crime involving rape. It crossed impairment boundaries and included community living, segregated institutions and women who rely on perpetrators for personal assistance. It offers new evidence of how disabled and Deaf victims and Survivors can collectively unsettle the harms of disablist hate crime and rape and achieve justice and safety on a micro level.