Stop Violence On Kids!

One afternoon the children of our workshop were surprised, not to find their colors to paint, and to see in their place several works of art, two of them showing landscapes and peaceful situations, the other two violent situations that were presented to listen to what they thought of them, what sensations they produced and how they compared them with their reality.

After hearing them say and blur the works with their words, we ask them to tell the stories of violence in their community. For the children it was a game and between laughs they narrated the fights in the school, the beating with its brothers, and the discussions of the adults, until finally some stopped laughing.

Vanessa with the crystallized eyes asked the professor, slowly, as if to say: "Teacher, is it bad if my mother hits me a lot?" John, who listens to everything, laughed and said nonchalantly, "No, it's okay if you misbehaved." To which Nikki, with his brief six years added, "I believe that my mother love more my brother, she beats him more than to me".

Encounter these stories meant a challenge, it meant understanding what we think and what we feel when we are close to violence. And so began a journey through the stories of hundreds of children, mothers, teachers, and even criminals. In all the stories they found two points in common: violence does not like anyone, paralyzes and is scary, but those who live it daily begin to normalize it and fail to see in it the threat of the first time.

These points in common have been the inspiration to understand how art allows us to face violence from another point of view. When narrated in a drawing violence loses its power and can be seen in perspective. We begin to understand that it is not normal.

A mom who draws herself hitting her son stops thinking that "a spanking in time is fine". He realizes that the spanking that he once defended as a strategy to discipline his child is nothing more than a humiliation for him, which causes him rage and pain, but above all it can not educate, it does not explain why, it does not help grow.

The stories about violence do not have vibrant colors, only the youngest children are able to give pastel tones because somehow for them is part of their reality, and begin to understand it as another way to love. It's hard for adults to remember how important our parents were to us, how we immitated everything they did and the infinite love that little children profess to who they are to them the most important, brave and interesting adults ... their own family.

It is possible that art alone can not change the world, but it can make us see how violence feeds on our own actions, how we ourselves feed it on our children, when we use it as a way of relating to them . It can show us the anomie it produces in us, in our families and communities, but the most important thing is that it can show us how to change.

When a child is painting he uses his hands to make strokes with his brushes, he does not use them to fight. When adolescents create murals, sculptures and paintings, they develop in them the ability to think of alternatives to violence. When their parents paint with them they understand peaceful coexistence as an act of possible love and they learn to distinguish violence from discipline.

The violence is never good, we can not normalize it, but above all we have to understand that our actions add up and that in us is the possibility to change as we live, starting to paint a different story.