Mapping Barriers and Facilitators to Help-Seeking After Sexual Violence: An Intersectional-Ecological Scoping Review

Sexual violence survivors' help-seeking and disclosure experiences are shaped by interacting personal, relational, institutional, and sociocultural conditions. Research on help-seeking after sexual violence has often focused on individual or relational explanations, with limited synthesis of how barriers and facilitators operate across ecological levels and are differently experienced across survivors' social locations. Guided by the socio-ecological model and informed by intersectionality, this scoping review mapped barriers and facilitators to help-seeking and disclosure after sexual violence among adult survivors across diverse national contexts. Nine databases (CINAHL, Embase, Emcare, Informit, Medline, ProQuest, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science) were searched. Twenty-seven studies met inclusion criteria and proceeded to data charting and synthesis. Findings were organized across four ecological levels and examined in relation to reported social locations. Across studies, barriers were reported more frequently than facilitators and were distributed across all ecological levels. Individual-level barriers such as shame, self-blame, and nonrecognition were reinforced by relational silencing, institutional inaccessibility, and broader structural conditions including stigma, inequality, and mistrust. Facilitators were most often identified where responses increased safety, control, validation, and accessibility, particularly through trauma-informed, identity-affirming, and culturally responsive practices. The synthesis indicates that help-seeking is shaped by processes operating across ecological levels, while survivors' social locations influence how these processes are encountered. This review extends existing knowledge by clarifying how barriers and facilitators are produced within overlapping relational, institutional, and structural contexts. It identifies the need for trauma-informed culturally responsive, and structurally aware interventions that recognize survivors' differing positions within systems of power.