SiSi

Hello and welcome to SiSi.

SiSi is a collective of women survivors of intimate abuse. We trust women to stand together and fight against injustice. 

Our mission is to support women out of isolation to become leaders and to be recognised as experts by experience. We take collective action to inform and influence the policy, legal, social and political reform required to end intimate abuse. 

All women survivors are welcome including women from diverse communities.

We are experts by our shared experience of surviving abuse and by growing, sharing and acting together we will help end intimate abuse together. 

Through Sisi, survivors can share their truths and collectively raise each other up.

We do this by 

  • Networking and Gathering Survivors
  • Providing mentorship, capacity building and training
  • Being an independent source of data collection
  • Taking up representational roles to inform intervention models of policy and practice. 

SiSi is built upon the lived experiences of our members who are women survivors of intimate partner abuse. We take women out of isolation to gather and share our collective experiences in order to generate improved outcomes for survivor families engaging with services and institutions. Our collaborative partnerships include, providing an evidence base for research, delivering authentic survivor informed expert testimony in various forums empowered to end intimate partner abuse. Our experiences all point to the problem of male control of women and inform protective strategies to provide freedom to women reclaiming our lives from the devastation of living with abuse and violence while navigating state structures that often force continued contact with perpetrators of serious human rights abuses. Our stories are our foundation and we share them to create change that lasts. 

About our founder

Mary-Louise Lynch is the founder of Sisi. She tries hard not to be a militant feminist after surviving years of abuse while navigating systems in Ireland. She once worked in a family retail business and tried many paths through education and temporary employment while living with the devastation of ongoing coercive control and abuse by proxy. Not to be defeated and after realising there was no one coming to save her, she set about learning how abusers so easily manipulate law and procedures and why people kept telling her that it’s just the way things are. When she was young and felt invincible she wondered why her role models told her that she can’t fight the system? Now, Mary-Louise wants to contribute to building a better system instead.

“I felt like I was shouting into the void. No one could hear me and if they could, they were powerless to help me”

SiSi’s founding survivor