Abstract, finally finding its way to this page..

            Conveying the tale of sex trafficking, one of today’s particularly grim forms of injustice, falls mainly to dry reports of statistics or overly sensationalized media broadcasts.  The former form leeches the human quality from the stories and reduces the full picture to numbers.  On the other extreme, the newscasters portray the stories with such heightened emotional language that skews facts and focuses on the victimization of humans who are in actuality survivors.  Neither method of communication offers healing to the public or the individuals who have endured exploitation. 

            One major goal of expressive arts therapy is “not to eliminate suffering but to give a voice to it, to find a form in which it can be expressed” (Levine, p15).  Art has such power to transform.  Many of those who survived the holocaust and the generations who followed relied upon the arts to bring healing both personally and globally.  Rather than construct a research paper, I am interested in following a similar idea and creating a multimedia project centered on a collective of stories about trafficking collected from people I have the honor of knowing.  The project will include 2 paintings, a collection of poems and songs, a found object three dimensional art piece, and a well crafted creative nonfiction piece that ties together the other elements.