Tanaka Mhishi
Vice Chair

Tanaka Mhishi has been working with survivor organisations for a number of years, and was excited by the opportunity to join the board of SurvivorsUK after being impressed by the warmth and dedication that they had encountered from SurvivorsUK staff over the years.

“There’s a huge amount of passion and expertise at SurvivorsUK and I’m hoping that I can be a helpful eye in shaping and supporting it,” explains Tanaka, who is a writer and storyteller by trade. “The core of my work is a belief that well-told stories really can change the way we interact.” 

Tanaka has made a lot of work focussing on the male survivor experience – including a stage play about his own experience in 2015. “Since then, I’ve worked with charities who support survivors in speaking to the media, as well as collaborating with major news organisations to help them understand the needs of male survivors and how to better represent us,” Tanaka adds.

Most recently, Tanaka published Sons and Others: On Loving Male Survivors, an insightful and accessible book which challenges misconceptions and misrepresentations of sexual violence against men across media and society and offers a new way of seeing and understanding these men in our lives, asking how the violence they experience affects us all.

In his own time, Tanaka likes to bake “far too much” and play Dungeons and Dragons – “I’m utterly abysmal, but it’s still fun”. They are most looking forward to digging into the important conversations being had at SurvivorsUK.