Activism Project Notes Part A

For this project, my topic is domestic violence. I have done a little bit of research, so far mostly what I read about was what domestic violence is. I found some statistics and uncovered myths about domestic violence. I think domestic violence is something that is there in our society, but not really talked about much. I think for the most part there is still the common idea that that won't happen to me or he/she couldn't be an abuser.

We had two ideas for our project. One is to have an installation with a series of three mirrors, the first showing the victim, the second showing the perpetrator, and the last someone aware of it that does nothing. The mirrors would have the text and maybe quotes, images, and/or bits of stories. The idea is to raise awareness and put people into it so they can see that anyone can be any one of the three, because there often are sterotypes that are not true and hide the truth perpetuating the problem. There would also be text to tie it all together....maybe faces of domestic violence? I could also see a black curtain like thing above it like they are being uncovered. The other idea was to do a similar idea with posters and/or flyers that could be hung up or passed around campus to reach a larger audience.

Today, we met in class and decided to go with the flyer idea. We are going to make a wanted poster to hang around campus. There are several myths/misconceptions about domestic violence and we are going to try and counter that in our project. Typically, domestic violence is frequently attributed to the "lower class," males, minorities, and especially the uneducated...so in our wanted ad we wanted to portray someone that people may not typically think would be an abuser...therefore we decided to do an upper middle class "educated" white woman to show how domestic violence is not specific to particular groups of people, it can reach across all races, genders, and socioeconomic classes. We wanted to use the wanted ad and mug shot to capture people's attention and lure them in, then we are going to put some statistics below it about domestic violence specific to what we were targeting in our flyer.