Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
A childhood abuse survivor who climbed Everest, then took other survivors up its lower slopes with her
Silvia Vasquez-Lavado grew up in Lima, Peru, during the years of violence linked to the Shining Path insurgency, and was sexually abused as a child, an experience she has written about only as an adult. She left Peru on a scholarship to study in the United States, where she built a successful career in technology, but carried the abuse's effects into her twenties as depression and alcoholism that she has described candidly rather than glossing over.
A turning point came at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, where she has said a vivid experience of reconnecting with a sense of her younger self pushed her toward mountaineering as a way of physically working through trauma she had spent years avoiding directly. She began climbing seriously in her thirties, training for progressively harder peaks while continuing to work full time.
In June 2016 she reached the summit of Everest, becoming the first Peruvian woman to do so, and went on to complete the Seven Summits, becoming the first openly gay woman known to have done so, a fact she chose to make public despite the personal exposure involved, arguing that visibility mattered more than comfort.
She founded an organisation, Courageous Girls, that takes groups of young survivors of sexual trafficking and abuse on trekking expeditions toward Everest base camp, using the physical challenge of the mountains as a structured way for other survivors to process trauma much as she had. She later wrote a memoir about her life, In the Shadow of the Mountain, and continues to combine mountaineering with this advocacy work.