Simon Industrial Fellowship awarded to Duncan Craig, OBE

Since 2009, the charity Survivors Manchester has worked in five prisons in the North West to break the silence of the sexual abuse, rape and sexual exploitation of boys and men and empower those affected to move towards positive futures.

Through the Simon Fellowship the charity’s CEO, Duncan Craig OBE will work alongside Professor Gadd, Dr Emily Turner and Dr Filippo Varase in the University to enable the Outspoken Talking Therapy service - developed by Survivors Manchester - to build expertise in narrative and biographical research than can be used to understand the nature of change embarked on by male survivors of sexual assault who are serving prison sentences.

The team will upskill Survivors staff and select prisoners in the use of narrative interview methods and help them design an evaluation that embodies a culture of care for survivor participants and actively engages them in its development. They will establish measures of change for Outspoken clients, including those serving long sentences and those anticipating release and extend the Department of Criminology’s flagship Social Responsibility Learning Inside initiative, which has allowed undergraduate students to study alongside prisoners.

Duncan said: “Being part of the Simon Industrial and Professional Fellowship is incredibly exciting for me, particularly as it takes me back to The University of Manchester, where my whole life-changing journey to this very point started - it really does feel like a complete full-circle moment.

“It was here that I fully realised my own experience as a survivor of abuse, realised the need to create Survivors Manchester to support male survivors of abuse, and realised the need to better understand male survivors of abuse experience in healing, I realised I can write a Masters Dissertation. So the opportunity the fellowship has presented me in returning to the place it all started, to work to further understand how to collect male survivors words in a way that can put male survivors at the front and centre of knowledge of male survivors healing is, well, exactly what the University always promised me as I graduated - lifelong learning.”