The 12-year-old boy used only a black marker and a blank sheet of paper. His task ? to draw a family portrait. His finished product ? a gun.
For many children who come to the Family Crisis Center of Baltimore County, family portraits aren?t a reflection of the American dream.
“None of the drawings, or few of them, are beautiful. It?s what?s inside,” said shelter Director Rebecca Foster, who does the same family-portrait exercise with all newcomers. “It?s very difficult to talk about abuse. How do you put it into words?”
Women and children, and a few men, come to the Family Crisis Center shelter to escape domestic violence. Every year, more than 400 victims of domestic abuse and their children call the shelter their home, said Lisa Muscara, the center?s assistant director.
Foster has seen many family portraits in her 18 years of working with domestic violence victims, but the images put on paper by women and young children don?t get any easier to view.
She hands them only the materials, then asks them to draw a family portrait. Children have a choice among markers, crayons and pencils, but the majority of drawings are black and white.
“It?s a way to elicit the story, by giving them another means of expression,” Foster said.”Our art is another way for us to communicate. Women often feel very embarrassed or guilty.”
One little girl drew a picture of her mother dead. Prior to coming to the shelter, she intentionally had run in front of a car, tired of living in fear that she would come home from school one day to find that her mother had been killed.
Another family portrait was a black hole. Another was a dog with a pile of waste. “Me” was written above an arrow pointing to the waste.
“Home was more like a prison than a home,” a 12-year-old boy told Foster as he drew a picture of himself and his mother behind bars.
Children who choose to draw their actual family often depict an abusive scene in which a man is hurting the mother, but oddly each figure has a smiling face.
“Quite often, kids will draw smiles because it?s not OK for them to be mad or angry,” Foster said. “If they do, they get into trouble, or they are beaten. They?re trying to be the perfect child.”
One young girl drew a picture of her father passed out on a sofa and herself looking around a corner.
“It?s just that he drank and tore the house up all the time,” she told Foster. “I?m peeking around the corner to see if he was passed out yet, to see if it was safe to come out.”
Making the artwork, while an emotional and vulnerable experience for victims, is often therapeutic and can be an eye-opener to mothers who stay in abusive relationships.
“It helps them think when they can?t think,” Foster said.
Oftentimes, the women who come to the shelter will draw a picture on the day they arrive and another several weeks later. The before-and-after images are a testament to the shelter?s resources.
Women may choose to keep their drawings private or have them shown to others in a effort to break the stigma, because isolation plays a major role in the continuance of abuse,Foster said.
“I have a plan now. Others have been through this,” wrote one
woman who came to the shelter with her three children to escape her husband. “I know it?s hard ? but I
have a plan, and it is going to be all right.”
