Advocate Sarah Rosenberg on reframing consent, misconceptions about the justice system, and letting survivors lead the way

‘Anything female faces additional barriers’

The Aussie-born advocate and founder of With You We Can speaks about the radical reframing of consent and trying to change a broken justice system to empower victims.

In 2021, you founded With You We Can, a victim-led network demystifying the police and legal processes for victims of sexual violence while working to improve them. Can you tell us a bit more about With You We Can and why you decided to start it?

I very much entered the system pen and paper in hand, wanting to expose the hell of it. My mother was a lawyer, so I went in expecting the worst. But it was worse than anything I could have imagined. It was appalling. I was like ‘Whoa, I’ve got to do something with this.’ 

I set about pulling together advocate-experts, front-line services, and I wanted to include the police as well, which is quite rare. This extensive consultation established the need for the resource, so everyone jumped behind it quite quickly, which is a very bittersweet feeling because it’s like ‘Wait, this must be a good idea, I’m receiving support,’ but it was also like, ‘Why is little old me doing this? The government should be doing this.’ 

At its core, it was about democratising access to information to facilitate equality of access to the law. I think reporting is a public service, we literally rely on victims to speak up so the state can prosecute and keep us safe. 

Why was it important that survivors lead the way?

In terms of it being victim-led, I was working with a group of victims at the time and the thing that always comes up is retraumatisation. But it’s not because you have to tell your story over and over. It was that the system takes away your agency, like it was taken when you were assaulted, and that’s right at the time you’re trying to reclaim it by doing something. It just seemed that the kinds of heads-up from police or legal that you’d think would be common decency seemed to not apply, whether that was not understanding the nuanced information I wanted, whether that was police being so overworked, and so it was just like, you guys don’t get it. The tiniest thing can make the biggest difference, and only other victims can identify that. That was really where it being victim-centric came from, and obviously we know that’s best practice anyway, but it was important that it was balanced and fact-checked and as relevant to as many different experiences as possible. And it continues to grow all the time. 

With You We Can’s website features a Knowledge Hub with a myth-busting section, because sexual assault myths can be one of the biggest barriers to survivors securing justice. What are some of the most common myths about sexual assault you wish could be busted for good? 

The things I resonate most with as frustrating myths that need to be busted are myths about the functioning of the legal system. I think it’s a hugely underexplored driver of rape culture. The fact that anyone can think a victim reported for revenge – a victim can’t even report not for revenge! The victim has no control, you’re just a witness. It’s not about you. When you go to court, you don’t even have a lawyer – you’re totally unrepresented in the case against your own perpetrator. 

The whole framework and functioning of the system is that the state has gathered enough evidence of someone’s guilt for them to decide it’s worth expending a load of state resources in an attempt to prosecute them. People don’t know that. 

I’m also interested in the fallibility of memory and the neuroscience of trauma. I think there’s a real absurdity with how far ahead science is. We have this information that’s not being integrated into the legal system yet. There are best practices when trying to elicit the best evidence from a victim and those aren’t followed. People typically expect a victim to react a certain way and all you have to do is Google one time and you understand that trauma affects people differently; they might disassociate, they might not cry, they might this or that. Are we just giving licence to ignorance? The myths are absurd. 

What do you wish more people understood about supporting someone who’s been through sexual assault?

You don’t have to get everything right, it’s better you say something than nothing. The way you respond to someone can shape whether they disclose again and whether they choose to seek help – it’s profoundly impactful. The community has the chance to offer us the justice that we all know the legal system is never going to give us. 

There’s that quote I love by Judith Herman that goes, ‘The perpetrator asks nothing of the bystander, but the victim asks you to share in the burden of pain.’ We should be sharing that burden. This is everyone’s fault. But people need to know that the impact they can have is profound. I think grief or fear or guilt or lack of knowledge can paralyse us and you just don’t want to say anything. Think about when someone loses their grandmother and often you go, ‘Oh they probably don’t want to hear from me, it’s best not to say anything. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.’ Just say something. 

The police and legal processes of reporting sexual assault can be re-traumatising for victims, particularly as it takes away their agency at a time when they have chosen to reclaim it. What would a victim-centred process actually look like?

It wouldn’t be the legal system at all. There’s concepts like transformative justice which go a step beyond and really consider the drivers that led the perpetrator to get to where they were. Not in terms of trying to justify the behaviour, we’re talking about drivers in terms of societal factors; marginalisation, lack of welfare or support for different groups. The closest we can get to a victim-centric system – until we decide to blow it up and start over which certainly won’t happen in my lifetime – is a system where victims have lawyers and representation. That’s the number one reform that I’m working on. You’ve got no one. There’s no one to ask for advice, guidance, what your options are. Even when process is evaded, you’re a passenger.

With You We Can isn’t just about helping survivors navigate the system - it’s also about changing it and with stats showing 1 in 5 women have experienced sexual violence from the age of 15 and reports showing this crime is increasing – change is clearly urgently needed. What’s the biggest barrier you’re still fighting to break down?

The number one challenge facing victims today, in my opinion, is being believed. That’s closely followed by misconceptions about the justice system. If the community had any idea how the system functioned - remember we don’t learn about it in school, despite it being a huge public institution we rely on, civil studies aren’t mandatory anymore, most law students graduate without ever having come across sexual assault processes - we’d put a hard stop to a fair few rape myths. Take the myth that a victim reported ‘for revenge’. If you had any idea how difficult it was to report, or understood that a victim has no control to press charges, you wouldn’t be saying that! 

Turning your pain into advocacy takes a huge emotional toll. How do you protect your own mental health while helping others navigate theirs? 

I protect myself very poorly. I’m so lucky I have the most expansive and bravest support system in the world, but I’m really bad at doing this. It’s not sustainable the way I’m doing it right now, I’m not exaggerating – it will kill me if I continue to do this work this way. This trip right now that I’m on is about getting better at capacity building and taking a step back. I want to be able to do the work sustainably. 

It’s not the content. A bit like the retraumatisation thing, it’s not just talking about rape all the time or the messages I get from a young girl in India who is about to be married to the local creep. I can’t do anything, I’m so powerless, and what makes me more sad than anything is that someone has reached out into the abyss to a faceless Instagram account because they don’t have anyone to talk to. Waking up to that everyday is rough, but it’s not that. It’s the lateral violence in the sector that makes it so difficult. There is so much damage in this sector, it’s very fragmented. The content you’re working on is horrible, it’s an uphill battle. And anything female faces additional barriers. 

Everyone brings a lot of damage in, you don’t get into this work without personal experience and I think people think advocacy is healing – and it can be. But oftentimes it’s not. I think everyone is seeking the validation they didn’t get from the justice system or community and that’s totally fair, but it leads to a lot of politics behind the scenes and lashing out and competition. It hurts the most because you think these are the people that are meant to get it because they’ve been through what you’ve been through. That’s the difficulty with the work – the stakeholders. 

The Body+Soul 2025 Sex Census revealed 15 per cent of Australians casually dating aren’t sure how to define consent, with 1 in 3 experiencing a situation where consent is not clear. What do you wish more Australians understood about consent? 

I wish more Australians would conceive of consent positively, rather than getting their backs up and thinking about the legal implications of its absence. We’re so uncomfortable with talking about respecting consent that we’ve normalised violating it. Communicating with your sexual partner about their desires and what works for them, and importantly, giving yourself permission to ask yourself the same, is how the magic happens. If we spent less time conceptualising consent in its legal context – do I have permission to perform this act? – maybe we could shift our thinking away from consent as a rigid checklist completed for fear of legal consequence, and toward consent as an ongoing reflection of how we want to interact with others. 

If you can understand why you should want to check in with your sexual partner, if both parties can understand the value, and the joy, of reciprocity and empathy when it comes to sex, you won’t cringe at asking for consent. And you won’t want to proceed without it. 

In 2023 you became an Edna Ryan awardee for making a feminist difference in community activism and this year you’ll embark on a fellowship as a Westpac Social Change Fellow. Having achieved so much four years on from founding With You We Can, what’s next for you? 

The next thing I’m doing is going to London to talk about piloting independent legal representation as they’ve got a pilot up and running there. The University of Glasgow has invited me to come as they’re trying to get up a pilot themselves based on pilots I just got up in Australia. That’s going to be a very close knit group of professors. 

There are pilots happening at the moment and there are new pilots for the States that weren’t already doing them that begin January 1st, 2026. Until then, the Women’s Legal Services Australia and myself want to begin a campaign to build awareness. If these pilots are going to work, firstly victims need to know that they don’t currently have representation and that it is available. The community needs to know that too, because it’s the biggest reframe I think. There are people within the actual legal system who need to understand that if a victim comes in with a lawyer, that doesn’t mean they’re suspicious or guilty, it’s being piloted. There’s a lot of community education that needs to be done, so we’re thinking of hitting the road and going around doing an advocacy tour. That’s the priority when I get home. 

Find more resources at withyouwecan.org

Originally published as Advocate Sarah Rosenberg on reframing consent, misconceptions about the justice system, and letting survivors lead the way