The Voices and Faces Project is a national documentary initiative and non-profit organization created to bring the names, faces and stories of sexual violence and trafficking survivors to the attention of the public.
”The victims, mainly women, offered a variety of reasons for not reporting the incidents, including fear and embarrassment, not being able to identify the suspect, a lack of confidence that police or transit authorities would take a report seriously, and a belief that such incidents are to be expected on public transit.”
"Each example illuminates another. We have to know what’s wrong to change what’s wrong, but the special problem of sexualized violence is used to silence and shame the victim. Documenting the problem allows individual victims to know they’re not alone or at fault, and allows the institutions of society to create remedies, from laws to education. Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it visible and subject to prosecution. In the past, what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The first was public and could be changed, and the second was private, off limits, even sacred. By making clear that sexualized violence is political and public, it breaches that wall. It admits that sexualized violence can be changed."
"One of the things I’ve learned in the last fifteen years is how much women are silenced through sexual abuse. The simple experience of being abused, whether as a child or as an adult, has an incredible impact on everything about the way you see the world around you, so that either you don’t feel you can speak because you’re frightened of what the retaliation will be, or you don’t trust your experience of reality enough to speak – that happens to a lot of incest victims. Or you are actually physically kept from being able to speak – battered women do not have freedom of speech."
