Dehumanization

The message that I was trying to convey with my poster was the idea that in situations in which there is abuse, as well as in greater world conflicts, often both the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s) are dehumanized.

The victim is something to be pitied. If there is sexual violence involved, and especially if the victim is a woman, she is sometimes viewed as irrevocably sullied and thus a source of shame to her family and community. In addition, simply labeling someone a victim carries connotations of helplessness and mental or physical sickness resulting from the trauma experienced. That is not to say that we shouldn't recognize that people experience awful things and are victims of violence and abuse. I just believe that sometimes the term "victim" is used in ways that aren't necessarily empowering.

Similarly, in United States society, once a person has been labeled a perpetrator, they are often socially ostracized and the record of that label can stay with them for the rest of their life, affecting their ability to care for their own basic needs, including getting a job and finding a place to live. Our justice system seems to be set up on the assumption that a perpetrator will be a perpetrator for the rest of their life because there is so much focus on punishment for crimes and so little focus on trying to help people so that they don't commit crimes in the future.

I even considered having the body of the man be made up of the word "monster", because I think that especially perpetrators of sexual crimes are overtly demonized. And while there is never any excuse for abuse or sexual or violent crimes, I think that it is dangerous to dehumanize and demonize any human being because once you can dismiss someone's humanity, it is a lot easier to in turn harm or oppress them. I decided against using the word "monster" because "perpetrator" sounds more like a legal term and as I said earlier, I think that the legal system in the United States shares blame in dehumanizing both victims and perpetrators.

I thought that this is an important issue to address because I don't see how peace and reconciliation and justice and come about if we don't recognize our common humanity.

In terms of my process, I started out by sketching. I drew several sketches before I came up with the idea for what ended up on my poster. I liked the idea of having the words make up their bodies because I thought that would indicate the way the labels of "victim" and "perpetrator" often replace in others' eyes the entire beings/identities of the people being labeled. But I knew I wanted to do more than just point this out, so I added the word human as a question in conjunction with the text at the bottom in order to try to get people to question the morality and implications of the dehumanization of victims of perpetrators.

Once I got to the computer it was just a matter of arranging the words at different angles and in different fonts and sizes to make the shapes of the woman and man. And several hours later, I had me a poster.

By Kate Pritchard