Research for All Research for All https://doi.org/10.14324/RFA.06.1.03 Article A systematic review that evaluates the extent and quality of involving childhood abuse survivors in shaping, conducting and disseminating research in the UK Simone Kennedy 1, * , Susan Bewley 2 , Jane Chevous 3 , Concetta Perôt 2,3 , Marcella Vigneri 4 , Loraine J. Bacchus 1 1 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK 2 King’s College London, UK 3 Survivors Voices, King’s College London, UK 4 CEDIL, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK *Correspondence: simone.kennedy29@gmail.com Submission date: 5 October 2020; Acceptance date: 18 October 2021; Publication date: 27 January 2022 How to cite Kennedy, S., Bewley, S., Chevous, J., Perôt, C., Vigneri, M. and Bacchus, L.J. (2022) ‘A systematic review that evaluates the extent and quality of involving childhood abuse survivors in shaping, conducting and disseminating research in the UK’. Research for All, 6 (1), 3, 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/RFA.06.1.03. Peer review This article has been peer-reviewed through the journal’s standard double-blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Copyright 2022, Simone Kennedy, Susan Bewley, Jane Chevous, Concetta Perôt, Marcella Vigneri and Loraine J. Bacchus. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/RFA.06.1.03. Open access Research for All is a peer-reviewed open-access journal. Abstract Despite a well-established understanding of the mental and physical health consequences associated with exposure to childhood abuse, the active voices of survivors are rarely present in shaping, conducting and disseminating research. To explore the extent and quality of involvement with adult survivors of childhood abuse in the UK, we performed a systematic review of research conducted ‘with’ or ‘by’ survivors, and analysed involvement against a new instrument, the Survivor Research Involvement Ladder, which was co-produced drawing from the principles of the Survivors Voices Charter. A search of relevant grey and peer-reviewed literature was conducted, which retrieved 662 sources after removing duplicates. Of these, 116 full-text articles on adult survivors of childhood abuse in the UK were subsequently assessed for involvement (beyond participation as ‘subjects’), of which