NHS Lanarkshire’s gender-based violence services wanted a film to be used to train health professionals and support workers, to raise awareness of the impact of childhood sexual abuse, especially to underline the fact that abuse is always the abusers fault, given survivors often experience feelings of guilt.

Sexual abuse of children is an uncomfortable theme that people naturally shy away from. So one of our challenges was to create a film with visual appeal and a narrative drive, that will keep audiences emotionally engaged, even when they’d prefer not to think too deeply about the sexual abuse of children.

We opted for animation to protect the identities of those contributing real-life stories to the scripting process, while being able to get across the inner life of the survivor of sexual abuse.

Feedback from audiences is that the animation successfully uses originality and creative flair in the animation visuals and the sound design to get its point across.