Making Waves: building confidence and connection on the water
Earlier this year, we partnered with All-Aboard Watersports – a charity that helps people access watersports in the heart of Bristol Harbour. Together, we ran a weekly group for eight survivors currently waiting for support with SARSAS.
We know that group activities can be incredibly beneficial, offering empowering spaces where people feel less alone.
We were really pleased with the feedback – participants told us the sessions helped build their confidence, strength, and sense of connection. Even better, the group has been discussing continuing to meet once a month for watersports even after the sessions end!
Below is some incredibly moving feedback we received from one of the group participants.
I love how paddling together is the antithesis of what happened to me. From isolation to togetherness; invisible to visible; powerless to powerful; from shame to my head held high.
Coercive control and sexual violence are so devastating to the soul – yet no-one else can see, let alone truly grasp the mechanics of how it systematically slices up every inch of your confidence, leaving every bit of it and you in tatters.
That cowardly kind of abuse can only happen in private and always in isolation. But out here on the water, we aren’t alone anymore but together. When passers-by stop and stare, they have no idea of who we are as a group and how our individual tragedies have bound us together. It’s unlikely that they would read victim or survivor but might instead see a group of women having some fun on a weekday afternoon. Our strength is visible yet our wounds not. As I rhythmically place my paddle in the water, my body is reminded of my ‘strong’ again. Each stroke a gentle yet powerful reminder to my soul about who I was before.
We pause to admire the egg chair hanging from the stern of a narrowboat. I notice a man on the shoreline staring, releasing a curl of smoke skywards. From the safety of my kayak and the water between us, I stare back. The past erupts from out of nowhere like a breaching whale and he becomes the archetype for all that brought me here. I panic and lose sense of where, when, who, why. It’s the harsh squawk of a seagull which drags me back through the vortex of time. I vigorously shake my head, breaking free from the shackles of the past—the etch-a-sketch lines of traumatic memory fading, snapping me sharply back to the present. I look again. In the here and now, I can see that he’s just a man taking a walk whilst smoking a cigarette.
Any shame I feel about what happened to me slithers off me, over the kayak and out into the water. It is replaced instead with a sense of pride – not because of what happened to me but what I have managed to curate out of it as a result. I glance once more. A wry grin tugs at the corners of my mouth and I plunge my paddle into the water – my back turning to those finger-snap-stitched-together fragments of experience – as I pivot hard.
Right there and then, in the mirror of the onlooker’s gaze, the power has switched sides.
You can find out more about All-Aboard Watersports here.
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What is a sexual assault referral centre (SARC)?
A SARC can offer free, confidential medical, practical and emotional support to people who have been raped, sexually abused or assaulted at any point in their lives. They’re usually provided by the NHS, but will always have specially trained doctors, nurses and support workers.
