BY DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS
I felt a flutter of nerves as I hopped off the mounting block and swung my leg over bright bay quarters. 16’2” is a long way up, especially above the cobbles of a country house stable yard, and it had been a good decade since I’d last gathered up reins, tightened a girth, and given a squeeze to set off. But as my mount strode out down the driveway looking eagerly toward the horizon, my nerves dissipated. Better yet, so did the tension I’d been carrying with me.
There’s no doubt about it, the countryside is therapeutic. Trot down a country lane as the early morning mist rises and you can’t help but feel lighter, more optimistic. I had a similar experience a few years ago when I pulled myself out of a period of depression by rescuing a dog from the Greyhound Trust. Our daily walks became periods of deep meditation, of reconnection with earth and sky. Animals have a way of transporting us out of our own thoughts and into communion with something bigger than ourselves.
Nature heals.
It’s all the more tragic, then, that for those in our society who have suffered the most – the survivors of grooming gangs, and others who have been left traumatised by the institutions that are supposed to protect us – this sort of therapy is a world away.
People assume that when Elon Musk tweets, or a politician stands up in Parliament and reads out a speech, and those things go viral, that somehow a problem has been resolved, at least partially. We live in a world in which the click of a button – ‘like’, ‘sign’, ‘retweet’ – is considered ‘doing something’. The grooming gang scandal went viral. The public now knows about it. We clicked those retweet buttons and played our part. The world got a little bit better, right?
But not for those at the heart of it, the survivors themselves. When the roar of a politician’s speech dies down and the headlines are yesterday’s news, the survivors live on, dealing with the aftereffects of their trauma, often with little or no help. To them, the social media circus is just another round of been-there and done-that. The journalists and inquiry staff are merely the latest in a long list of those who take their stories and disappear, leaving them to cope with anxiety, PTSD, and a whole host of associated disorders, usually alone.
Those disorders have a very real impact upon their lives. According to NHS figures, adults living in the most deprived 20% of areas were significantly more likely to report trauma and screen positive for PTSD. Specifically, four in ten reported a traumatic event, v’s just under a third in the least deprived areas, and 9.4% screened positive for PTSD, against 3.9% in the least deprived areas. These results were backed up by research from the University of Southampton and King’s College London, which further established that people from deprived areas also experience more severe PTSD symptoms and show less of an improvement at the end of treatment than those from more affluent areas.
Health, too, is impacted. One in ten people with poor physical health suffer from PTSD, compared to just 3.4% of those in good physical health.
But there is also a correlation between poverty, poor health, and access (or rather, lack thereof) to the countryside.
The Health Foundation last year found that “28% of people living in the most deprived neighbourhoods live in the 10% of neighbourhoods with the least access to green space”, compared with “only 7% of people in the least deprived neighbourhoods.” In other words, the more deprived an area is, the less likely it is that residents will have access to green spaces.
A 2023 study commissioned by the British Mountaineering Council (BMC) found similar results: income was a key barrier to accessing the British countryside, with those on a living wage being twice as likely to never access the countryside as those who earn more. Conversely, those with a larger household income are five times more likely to visit the countryside at some point than those in low income brackets. Even worse, one in five people “report having a mental or physical health condition which holds them back from taking part in outdoor activities” – a vicious cycle if ever there was one.
What we’re seeing here is misery begetting misery: trauma leads to economic deprivation and poor health, which in turn prevents those individuals from accessing the healing power of our beautiful countryside.
While there have been a few attempts made by the state to facilitate therapeutic access to nature, such as city farms and garden projects, the reality is that most survivors get no help of any kind. Many report being offered just six hours of talking therapy by the NHS to deal with decades’ worth of abuse. Even on its face this offering is ridiculous; it’s even worse given that it’s now recognised that talking therapy is less effective in treating trauma and abuse than somatic therapies such as animal therapy. The consequence is that those survivors who were failed by the state as children, when their abuse was ignored, continue to be failed by the state to this day.
It is for this reason that my organisation, The Survivor’s Archive, is this month running a rural retreat for grooming gang survivors which we hope will be the first of many.
The Survivors’ Archive is an oral history and research project, designed to build a full picture of the grooming gang scandal. However, we recognised very early on that we couldn’t simply take the survivors’ stories and walk away. We needed to first put a support system in place.
That support system will include helping survivors to access regular, long term, quality therapy, but we also wanted to offer something unique: the opportunity for survivors who live in deprived areas to experience the healing power of nature.
Deep in the Oxfordshire countryside, our first retreat begins with a guided nature walk, allowing participants to connect with their surroundings. We invite them to feel drawn to something that speaks to them, to bring that object back to the retreat, and to keep it with them throughout the weekend. Amid art, yoga, and other gently therapeutic techniques, survivors are encouraged to spend as much time as they can in the gardens of the retreat, taking the opportunity to decompress from stressful lives.
The retreat isn’t intended to replace therapy – decades of abuse can’t simply be undone by a weekend in the countryside – but we hope that by the end of the weekend survivors feel a little more comfortable in bodies that have been used and abused by others, a little more resilient as they head back into the world.
After all, with all that they’ve been through, the survivors deserve that at least. The survivors we’re talking with have told us that they need this retreat, that there isn’t anything else like it out there for them.
To help them access it, please donate towards the cost HERE.
Donna Rachel Edmunds is a former journalist with Breitbart London and The Jerusalem Post. You can find more of her writing on Substack at Freedom Radio, and on X at @donna_rachel_