Rights-based, trauma-informed, survivor-centric — a three-pronged rebellion against systemic neglect.
Why? - The Thesis
I remember the silence more than the noise.
In crowded waiting rooms, in endless court corridors, in dusty government offices where paperwork stacked higher than hope, injustice was not a grand spectacle. It was small, ordinary, shrugged off with a sigh. I did not yet know the language of "systemic neglect," but I could feel its cold shape, the way some bodies moved through doors more easily, the way some voices grew hoarse from being unheard. Long before I studied law, long before I could trace injustice to statutes and policies, I knew what abandonment looked like. It looked like this: being made to wait. Being made invisible. Being made to carry the weight of broken systems alone.
The neglect I witnessed was not an accident, nor a fleeting oversight. It was a symptom of something larger, older, and far more dangerous.
What Are We Fighting?
Systemic neglect isn't a failure of individuals. Systemic neglect isn't the result of isolated mistakes or a few bad actors. It is the slow, deliberate decay of responsibility, built into the scaffolding of the very institutions meant to protect and serve. It happens when forgetting becomes policy, when apathy becomes architecture. It is not the cruelty of one, but the collective abandonment by many. Systemic neglect is not new. It is a legacy centuries in the making, written into the margins of laws that named some bodies worth protecting and others worth sacrificing. From denied land rights to segregated courtrooms to ignored petitions for safety, the architecture of forgetting has always been deliberate.
"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute." — Proverbs 31:8
The Three-Pronged Rebellion
Rights-Based: Law as a Living Promise
When housing policies treat eviction as a clerical matter rather than a human emergency, rights have already been eroded. Why rights are more than slogans: they must be enforceable and visible. Rights are not acts of generosity handed down from the powerful, not as gifts from authority, but as birthrights, entitlements of every human being, owed not offered, that must be respected and defended. A rights-based approach insists that dignity must be codified, protected, and fiercely enforced, not treated as charity or favour dressed up in legalese.
Justice begins by affirming that no one is invisible to the law.
Trauma-Informed: Systems That Remember What Was Done
A court that demands survivors recount their trauma in sterile, adversarial settings only compounds the original harm. Not just individual services, entire structures must be trauma-informed. To serve people, systems must first remember them: not just who they are, but what has been done to them. Trauma shapes how people access (or avoid) legal and social systems. Systems that ignore trauma re-traumatize. Being trauma-informed means recognizing harm is woven into histories, not isolated incidents. A trauma-informed approach demands that institutions reckon with the histories they would rather forget, recognizing that healing cannot happen where harm is ignored or minimized.
Justice must account for the wound, not just the wound's paperwork.
Survivor-Centric: Power Must Move
Designing services with survivors means centering their leadership, not surveying their suffering. Survivors must not just be "heard", they must shape the systems meant to serve them. The traditional top-down model of decision-making perpetuates harm. Survivor-centric work is redistributing voice, agency, leadership. A survivor-centric approach transfers authority back to those who have lived through harm, insisting that their voices are not an afterthought, they are the architects of a system that must answer to their truth. Survivor-led movements remind us: justice isn’t validation after the fact. It’s participation from the start.
Justice isn't given to survivors. Justice is built with survivors.
Call to Arms
There are days when I wonder if it’s enough: if rewriting policies can ever truly rewrite memory. But then I remember: every small repair is an act of resistance against forgetting. If systemic neglect is a legacy, then so is resistance. Our rebellion is rights-based, trauma-informed, survivor-centric and it is unstoppable. The same silence that once smothered waiting rooms will be replaced by voices that refuse to be forgotten. The rebellion is not waiting. It is already underway.