As the world continues to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, Amita Swadhin is concerned about another global health crisis.

“I think we should all be using the phrase global pandemic to talk about child sexual abuse,” Swadhin tells Yahoo Life.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), a child is sexually abused every 9 minutes. Swadhin was one of them. In 1991, at the age of 13, she revealed to her mother that her father had been sexually abusing her for years.

“I was raped over 400 times as a child in my home, between the ages of 4 and 12. And my mom, like a lot of parents who are in shock and maybe trying to do the right thing — delayed but trying — my mom called a therapist and she didn’t know what mandated reporting was,” says Swadhin.

Mandated reporting requires the therapist to alert the authorities, and for Swadhin that experience only heightened her trauma.

“Social workers, police officers and prosecutors descended on our home. And I use that word intentionally because that’s how it felt,” Swadhin says.

“They threatened to incarcerate my mother, who had been a victim of my father’s violence for over 16 years.

“It was a very difficult added layer of violence from the state when what we really needed was community support,” she explains. “My mom is also an immigrant from India. ... We needed our community to come together and protect us and we didn’t get that.”

Today, Swadhin has turned her personal pain into activism. After receiving a fellowship from the Just Beginnings Collaborative, Swadhin traveled around the country for a year and a half, interviewing LGBTQ and people of color who are survivors of child sexual abuse.

She recorded 60 stories across 15 different states and started to uncover emerging trends from the date. From that, Mirror Memoirs was born.

“Mirror Memoirs uses the audio archive as a building block to then spin the stories into organizing tools. So we have an external wing of our work that takes data from the stories and clips and educates people beyond our community,” says Swadhin.

“Coming out for survivors of child sexual abuse, I feel like it’s a very parallel process to coming out or coming out nonbinary — which are two other pieces of my identity,” says Swadhin.

“Our intervention in rape culture is about uplifting who we feel are some of the most vulnerable survivors, who often get left out of movements to end sexual violence. We center Black and Indigenous Two Spirit, transgender, intersex and nonbinary survivors of child sexual abuse specifically,” says Swadhin.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in four female-assigned-at-birth and one in 13 boys experience sexual abuse during childhood. In the U.S., gender nonconforming children are at a higher risk for abuse.

“We should be looking to the leadership of transgender women, particularly transgender women of color, to be the face of our movements to end child sexual violence," says Swadhin.

To address the insidious nature of childhood sexual abuse, Swadhin routinely calls out the systems that allow it to flourish.

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