ABSTRACT
This article argues that experiential knowledge from child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors offers critical community-rooted expertise to transform child protection from within. Though not Indigenous in cultural or territorial terms, survivor knowledge shares key features with Indigenous epistemologies: It is embodied, relational, intergenerational and systematically marginalised by institutional frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic research with survivor-led mutual aid groups and trauma-informed practices in Italy, the study examines CSA survivors serving as frontline practitioners or experts by experience, whose dual positionality reveals tensions between institutional protocols and trauma realities. Findings reveal that survivor communities have developed collective, culturally embedded practices of care, spatial negotiation and narrative healing that challenge bureaucratic and punitive models of child protection. Positioning survivor knowledge as decolonial praxis, the paper expands the recognition of survivor knowledge as a legitimate source of expertise within child protection systems. It proposes concrete integration strategies: co-designing policies with survivor-practitioners, mandating lived-experience training and fostering horizontal accountability. By centring relationality and autonomy, this reorientation echoes calls to co-design child welfare with those most affected, ensuring protection evolves with those it serves across the life course.