The ravages of childhood and adult sexual trauma, directly and indirectly, affect countless individuals across the U.S. and internationally. Sexual violence touches upon almost every single social justice issue, including but not limited to race, gender, gender identity, disability, sexuality, education, housing, immigration, health care, mass incarceration, militarization, and politics. It is pervasive and overwhelmingly occurs intra-communally. The silent sexual violence epidemic disproportionately impacts black women, girls, and femmes who are also coping with the COVID-19 and racial (in)justice pandemics. According to the transnational Black feminist organization, Black Women's Blueprint, 60% of Black women will experience sexual assault by the time they are 18-years old.  Survivor, award-winning documentary filmmaker and writer Aishah Shahidah Simmons will share how and why we must multitask to disrupt and end all forms of violence and oppression. If we don't, none of us will be free from violence.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning cultural worker focused on disrupting and ending the inhumane scourge of sexual violence, without relying on policing and prisons.  Her latest work is the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse ( (AK Press, Fall 2019). As a filmmaker, Simmons is most widely known for her Ford Foundation-funded, 2006 groundbreaking, and internationally acclaimed documentary feature film, NO! The Rape Documentary.  Ahead of its time and released eighteen months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases, NO! is one of the instigators of the contemporary campus sexual assault movements. Simmons’s cultural work and activism are documented extensively, and her writings are published widely, including articles for The New York Times, NBC.com, Essence Magazine, and the #MeToo Movement.  She has taught, presented her work and lectured throughout North America, and in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.  Simmons, a Black, feminist, lesbian survivor, is on Instagram and Twitter, @AfroLez.