‘Heroines’ Project Gives Sex Assault Victims a Chance to Show Their Faces
Usually, they aren’t given a name. They make do with an initial. If a newspaper publishes a photo of them on the way to or from the courthouse, it is blurred, blotted out with enlarged pixels. As though they were the ones who had done something wrong. The identities of women who go through sexual abuse are usually not revealed. Often, this is their choice, which must be respected, but the choice is indicative of social assumptions.
Photographer Alicia Shahaf decided to counter this tendency in project called “Heroines,” showing portraits of women who have been sexually assaulted. Thus far she has photographed about 20 women. Each of them looks straight at the camera. They do not hide, they are not ashamed.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
