Reducing Harm. Building Understanding. Supporting Healing.
Second Assault is reimagining how we respond to child maltreatment.
Our Mission
Second Assault is dedicated to improving how systems understand and respond to child maltreatment by integrating lived experience, clinical insight, and research to reduce harm and promote more ethical, informed, and compassionate care.
Our Work
Second Assault is dedicated to improving how systems understand and respond to child maltreatment and trauma. By integrating lived experience, clinical insight, and research, the organization works to reduce retramatization, elevate survivor voices, and promote more ethical, informed, and compassionate approaches to care
We translate research and lived experience into practical, accessible guidance for professionals. Our work highlights where systems fall short, and importantly how they can improve.
Clinical & Research Bridge
We develop survivor-informed educational that helps clinicians, institutions, and the public better understand the real impact of child maltreatment and systemic responses to abuse. All storytelling is voluntary, ethical, and centered in participant autonomy.
Storytelling & Education
Survivor Empowerment
We center and elevate survivor voices as a form of expertise. Through advocacy, education, and ethical storytelling, we support individuals in reclaiming voice, agency, and representation within systems that have historically overlooked or misunderstood their experiences.
Why This Matters
For many survivors, the trauma does not end when the abuse stops.
When survivors seek help from systems meant to protect them, medical care, law enforcement, schools, courts, and mental health services, they may instead encounter disbelief, coercion, misdiagnosis, or neglect.
These responses can create a “Second Assault:” a form of institutional betrayal that deepens harm, delays healing, and silences survivors.
Preventing this harm requires systemic change.
Second Assault works to advance trauma-informed policies, professional training, and survivor-centered practices that reduce retraumatization and promote accountability.
Those most impacted by developmental trauma are often the ones least served by existing models of care.
Developmental trauma does not just affect a child’s sense of safety, it shapes the foundation that they had to develop from.
Healing requires more than addressing past abuse, it requires opportunities to build what, for many survivors, never existed.
“Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better.”
- Maya Angelou
Work With Second Assault
Second Assault Partners with Clinicians, Institutions, and Organizations to improve how developmental trauma and child maltreatment are understood and addressed.
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