Founding Trustee
Alison Benge
Alison worked as a teacher for 32 years, in main stream education and as a specialist teacher of the deaf. She is a survivor of sexual abuse who knows from personal experience that the current legal system is not able to offer a fair chance of justice.
We-Together has grown from her sense of injustice.
Chair of the Trustees & Founding Member
Dr Judith Miller
Judith is a psychotherapist who has worked with survivors of sexual assault and abuse for many years, both inpatients in psychiatric hospitals and outpatients in her practice. She has acted as a witness for the prosecution on a number of occasions and has been horrified at what has happened to her patients in the criminal justice system.
Trustee
James Kidwell
James trained as a chartered accountant in London, having read Economics at Nottingham University. Subsequently he worked in commercial finance in the television and music industries before moving into shipping services as finance director and chief executive of a UK listed shipping and energy services group until July 2019. He was introduced to the concept of We-Together by the other trustees and could see immediately the need for an independent, protected database which would be of great assistance in securing a greater number of convictions.
Founding Trustee
Geoffrey Benge
Geoffrey was Head of Pathology at an NHS hospital for many years and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. His involvement in We-Together is as a partner of a survivor. He has seen first hand how legal systems are weighted against victims.
The work We-Together is doing aims to right this imbalance.
Trustee
Perry Power
After breaking his silence about surviving childhood sexual abuse, Perry Power discovered that his late father was also a survivor. This revelation in 2017 ignited his mission to empower trauma survivors to find their voice and use it to inspire change. Having built an audience of over 450,000 followers, Perry combines storytelling and advocacy to help survivors transform their pain into purpose. As the founder of a publishing company, he guides survivors through the process of their stories as a pathway to healing, while his production company brings these narratives to life—starting with powerful 90-second reels and evolving toward full-length feature films. Perry’s work breaks cycles of silence, fosters connection, and sparks lasting transformation..
He believes We-Together is exactly what survivors need to reclaim their power and increase their chances of gaining justice.
Trustee
Chitra Balakrishna
Professor Chitra Balakrishna is an educator, researcher, and author with over 20 years of experience spanning across academia and industry in the areas of cyber security, data networking, mobile communications, technologies, and applications.
She is currently Professor of cyber security at The Open University and leads the cyber security strand within the government funded Institute of Coding (IoC) project, aimed at enhancing the UK’s digital skills and addressing the skills gap.
Chitra has been appointed as the founding member of the board of trustees of the UK cyber security council for her contributions to cyber security education, training and its professionalisation. Her work mainly focuses on human aspects of cyber security, and she has been instrumental in acquiring research income of over £2 million as a co-investigator and principal investigator from funding sources such as ERDF, Innovate UK, HEA, EPSRC and British Council.
In her current role, Chitra actively engages with certification providers, accreditation bodies (NCSC) and works closely with the cyber security academic community within UK (CISSE, UK). She is passionate about demystifying cyber security for everyone, and in building a secure, resilient and sustainable digital society.
Trustee
Eleanor Neyroud
Eleanor Neyroud has a PhD in Criminology from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. The focus of her PhD was the overlap between victimisation and offending in low level offenders. Currently Dr Neyroud works for the Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing working on research and teaching evidence based policing and statistics. Dr Neyroud also supervises Mst students at the University of Cambridge and works with the Metropolitan Police on randomised controlled trials testing out of court disposals.
Trustee
Simon Spence
Simon is a barrister and King’s Counsel at Red Lion Chambers in London. He has 40 years’ experience prosecuting and defending serious and complex cases, primarily homicide but also sexual offences, fraud and regulatory offences. He has appeared in a number of high-profile cases and is ranked as a Leading Silk in both Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners.
Away from his work, he is an avid music fan and keen amateur pianist. He is a Trustee of British Youth Opera. He lives in East Anglia.
Advisor
Dean Nicholson
I have worked in mental health for over 40 years, initially as a nurse before embarking on training to support individuals and families at the beginning of the AIDs epidemic in the mid 80s. I have been a trustee, trainer and chaired AIDs and HIV charities ever since.
In my work I have always been an advocate for LGBTQ+ services and organisations. I have worked and led therapy teams for the past 25 years in world class mental health clinics. As well as managing these teams I have worked as a therapist with challenging presentations but specifically with gender dysphoria, sexuality and sexual trauma.
Advisor
Steven Rhodes
Steven is a barrister who has worked in regulatory law for over 30 years in financial services and privacy law, including GDPR, practising in-house. He is also an adviser to the Genetics Working Group of the Association of British Insurers. He graduated in Theology, later graduating with a Master’s degree in Medical Ethics and Law, from King’s College London of which he is a Fellow.
Advisor
Glenn Miles
Glenn Miles PhD, MSc., FRCPH, FHEA, PGCE-PCET, RN-A, RSCN, is a Senior Researcher with up! International www.up-international.org. He is on the board and the academic research advisor for the Chab Dai Butterfly ten-year Longitudinal Research Project www.chabdai.org/butterfly which listens to the survivors of sex trafficking.
He does independent research, advocacy, training and evaluation of programs. His current research interests include working with survivors of trafficking to uncover sexual exploitation of boys and young men including through the use of the internet in Thailand, familial sexual exploitation and trafficking of young men in the States, labour exploitation of children in tea plantations in Sri Lanka, child participation and service provision of children in Armenia, He is an active member of the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars (GAHTS) www.gahts.org, Global Learning Community (www.chabdai.org) and Our Voices University Network (OVUN) (https://www.our-voices.org.uk/news)
He has also been developing a series of toolkits aimed at children in the form of large flip-books : www.good-touch-bad-touch-flipchart-asia.org is for prevention of sexual abuse and trafficking and has been modified for different contexts and translated into a wide range of Asian and African languages too. There is also a flip-book in called ‘Welcome’ for refugee children in transit to a host country www.tehila.org, and a further called ‘Sweetheart’ aimed at young school girls groomed by young men posing as boyfriends https://www.auscamfreedomproject.org . His training materials, videos and much of his research is available on his website www.gmmiles.co.uk
Advisor
Robert Burrell
Robert is Professor of Intellectual Property & Information Technology Law at the University of Oxford and Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School.
Advisor
Elly Hanson
Dr Elly Hanson is an independent Clinical Psychologist who has worked with the issues of child sexual abuse and trauma for over twenty years. She undertakes research, therapy, consultation, training, and assessments, working across criminal justice, education, child protection and voluntary sectors, as well as with national organisations such as the Children’s Commissioner, the Football Association, and Church of England.
For ten years she worked with CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency; now embedded within the National Crime Agency; NCA), and is an Expert Advisor to both local police forces and national policing (being on the NCA database of advisors). She regularly publishes research papers, reports and chapters on the topic of sexual abuse, including those on the dynamics and impact of online abuse; therapeutic approaches with victims and survivors; and online forces conducive to abuse. Elly also works with schools and educational organisations such as the PSHE Association on supporting children’s healthy relationships and preventing peer-to-peer abuse, and she is an experienced therapist. She previously worked for an NHS drugs and alcohol service with survivors of abuse, in an NSPCC team for children with harmful sexual behaviour, and for a company providing residential care to looked after children.
Advisor
Dr Peter Neyroud CBE QPM PhD
Peter Neyroud is Director of the Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. The programme is a master’s in Applied Criminology and Police Management. Peter is an Associate Professor in Evidence-based policing based in the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology. His research focuses on police diversion of offenders, crime harm, police ethics, community policing, the impact of COVID 19 on policing and police leadership and management. He has published books on Police Ethics, Police leadership and on the Policing of COVID 19.
Peter was a police officer for more than 30 years, serving in Hampshire, West Mercia and Thames Valley (as Chief Constable). He set up and ran the National Policing Improvement Agency (as Chief Constable and Chief Executive). In the latter role he was responsible for national implementation of all the major programmes in UK policing, including Neighbourhood Policing, Workforce reform and new technology.
In 2010, he was commissioned by the UK Home Secretary to carry out a fundamental “Review of Police Leadership and Training” which led to the establishment of the new National “College of Policing” in 2012 and radical reform of the qualifications and training of police officers, creating the new “Police Education Qualification Framework”.
He is the Co-Chair of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Coordinating Group and has been leading an international programme of systematic reviews on the prevention of terrorism and radicalization. He has been working with the UNODC on community policing and preventing terrorism and radicalization in Bangladesh. He is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
He is a dual Swiss/British citizen – ‘place d’origine’ Chardonne, Canton de Vaud.
Advisors to the trustees
GDPR and Legal Mr Steven Rhodes
Web Design Genius
Graphic Design Ms Hannah Calverley
Marketing Ms Nicola Hyde
Fund Raising Ms Samantha Davies
Parliamentary Advisor Sir Michael Pownall KCB