Tick-Box Listening
Why consultation without impact deepens harm rather than prevents it
By Jade Blue
There is a growing recognition that lived experience matters. Survivors are invited into rooms that were once closed to them - police working groups, advisory panels, consultations, and roundtables. On paper, this looks like progress.
In practice, too often it isn’t.
Survivors are asked to contribute, but not to shape. To speak, but not to influence. To share personal stories that lend legitimacy to decisions already made elsewhere. The language is inclusion; the reality is tokenism.
Tokenism happens when lived experience is treated as anecdotal colour rather than expertise. When survivors are invited late in the process, after frameworks are set and priorities are established. When their role is to validate systems, not to challenge them. When “engagement” means attendance, not power.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in criminal justice reform.
Police forces and justice agencies increasingly convene survivor reference groups and working panels. Survivors are asked to explain trauma, to recount harm, to describe what went wrong. They do so - often at personal cost - in the hope that their insight will prevent future failures.
Yet again and again, the same patterns repeat.
Recommendations grounded in lived experience are diluted, deferred, or quietly ignored. Structural critiques are reframed as individual grievances. Survivors are thanked for their “courage” and “honesty,” while the system itself remains largely unchanged.
This is not meaningful participation. It is an extraction.
Lived experience is not simply testimony. It is evidence. Survivors develop a deep, forensic understanding of systems precisely because they have navigated them under extreme conditions. They know where processes break down, where discretion becomes danger, and where policy language collapses under real-world pressure.
When that knowledge is sidelined, the consequences are not abstract. They show up in repeated investigative failures, misapplied legal tests, and victims being disbelieved or blamed.
Tokenism also carries a quieter harm. It teaches survivors that their role is to endlessly educate institutions, while institutions retain the power to decide whether to listen. It places emotional labour on those already harmed, without guaranteeing impact or accountability.
I say this having experienced both sides. I have been in spaces where survivor insight genuinely shifted thinking, and in others where the outcome felt predetermined long before the conversation began. The difference is not subtle. It lies in whether institutions are prepared to relinquish control rather than simply request testimony.
Where Make Yourself Heard Comes In
Make Yourself Heard exists because this cycle is no longer acceptable.
It was created to move lived experience out of the margins and into a position of influence - not as a symbolic presence, but as a driver of change. The platform brings survivor insight together with policy, culture, and public accountability, recognising lived experience as a form of expertise that must shape outcomes, not just conversations.
Make Yourself Heard is not about asking survivors to repeatedly explain their pain to systems that remain unchanged. It is about creating space where experiences are documented, amplified, and used to challenge practice, inform reform, and apply pressure where it matters.
This means shifting the question from “have we consulted?” to “what changed because survivors spoke?”
Real engagement requires institutions to be honest about power, willing to be challenged, and prepared to act. Make Yourself Heard exists to insist on that shift - and to support survivors to participate on their own terms, with purpose and impact.
Listening is not the goal.
Change is.
Being invited into the room means nothing if the decisions are already made.
