From ‘Help-Seeking’ to ‘Experiencing Support’: A Neurodivergent Community Perspective on Adult Post-Sexual-Victimisation Support
Abstract
Help-seeking is often positioned as the primary pathway through which victim/survivors of sexual victimisation access support. Yet, this framing assumes capacities for recognition of what happened as harm, initiation of contact, articulation, and system navigation that do not reflect the lived realities of many neurodivergent victims/survivors. In this Community Perspectives paper, I offer an alternative understanding: experiencing support. Drawing on personal experience as a multiply neurodivergent person, professional experience as an occupational therapist and a neurodevelopmental practitioner, and insights from neurodivergent and victim/survivor communities, I explore how support is felt through relational, environmental, sensory and contextual conditions rather than through traditional disclosure-dependent help-seeking systems. I introduce the Conceptual Model of Experiencing Support, a non-hierarchical idea map that illustrates these conditions and challenges of the linearity of traditional, neurotypical help-seeking frameworks that are embedded in systems that miss neurodivergent victim/survivors. The model is grounded in existing literature whilst centring community knowledge and neurodivergent ways of processing information. This reframing invites practitioners, services and communities to reconsider how support is offered, shifting responsibility away from victim/survivors and towards the creation of environments in which support can be safely experienced.