BIG HEARTS, LITTLE BEDS
Kids & A Safe Place team up to raise abuse awareness through art
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
Children are able to comprehend serious issues on a far deeper level than their growing vocabularies are able to express sometimes. That is why allowing them to create in other media can have such illuminating results.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Students Jasmine Butler (left) and Sage Geddes discuss their "Safe Place" diorama while Safe Place's Domestic Violence Coordinator Kristen Brock looks on at the Boys and Girls Club.

This was the reason that Kristen Brock, Domestic Violence Coordinator at A Safe Place, Inc., wanted to provide Boys and Girls Club students with small brass beds and allow them to decorate each bed the way artists in other cities have decorated massive cows, alligators, flamingoes and the like.

"The goals were for kids to have a better understanding of what child abuse was, and for them to help us carry that message to the community in a way that is different from getting a pamphlet or hearing a speaker," Brock said.

Forty kids participated. Each child began with the same materials: a brass bed and a definition of child abuse as anything that hurts a child's "mind, body or heart." They were then asked to express their feelings and thoughts on child abuse.

The kids' pieces are going on exhibit at the Atheneum from March 5 until March 19. At the end of the month, five local artists are coming in to assess the results and name winners, who will receive prizes underwritten by members of the community. Loren Brock, the owner of the Toy Boat, was a major fundrais- er for the project and insisted that every child received a prize. No one can lose doing art, she said.

"This was more art-related than other projects Safe Place has done with the kids, which were more social-work related. We talked with the kids about patterns, texture, color - all of the artrelated elements," Brock said.

Many of the kids built physical settings around their beds. And created contexts. "Ideas spread like wildfire," said Brock, who saw a boxful of clothespins become the standard material for rendering little babies, and shoeboxes become the standard materials for bedroom walls.

"One kid made a house for the bed, and then everyone else thought their project was inadequate, if they didn't have a house for the bed," Brock said.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

Second grader Jasmine Butler and third grader Sage Geddes created a "safe place" for their clothespin kids, and chose not to have them sleep in the little beds at all, but rather in "safes" that they made from toy boxes - to protect them from a faceless man, made out of pipe cleaners, trying to sneak into their bedroom window.

Another child, Andrina Davis, made a house, but didn't include the child: "There is no doll in my project, because they hurt her so much, she ran away," Davis said.

Second grader Victoria Wilson said she was influenced by what she'd heard about slavery during black history month, so she created a house for a family of slaves. "The problem is that they're hurt sometimes, by the whip and stuff, and sometimes they get slapped by their parents and stuff. So it's really sad for them," she said.

Using the definition of abuse as "anything that hurts a child's mind, body or heart," Maggie Gueorguiva and Shanna Howard created a hospital bed for a little clothespin girl named Ching Ying, who had cancer.

"I never thought of war, cancer or slavery in talking about child abuse. … But the kids said to me, 'Well, you told me abuse is something that's unfair to children and it hurts their heart, mind and body.' And I couldn't really dispute that," said Brock, who added that the adults probably learned more than the kids did. "For A Safe Place, it was a great learning experience about teaching children," she said.

Brock said that some adults questioned the appropriateness or relevance of the project. "It wasn't just for me to teach the kids; that was the most minimal part of it," said Brock, who hopes to expand the project to other organizations next year. "The goal was for kids to teach others, 'I'm wonderful, and you shouldn't hurt me.' I thought it would be best to come from the source, and people either understood

that or they didn't." I