Trauma Healing Program for Survivors of Sexual Violence, Northern Nigeria

The art projects helped create a safe place for the women to share their stories. Telling our stories enables individuals to integrate traumatic memories and gradually begin to heal and to reclaim their dignity. Language is often insufficient to convey the experiences of trauma in conflict. Thus the arts can help unlock this process and provide a new form of communication to address the silence and unspeakable pain.

The primary need of survivors of violation and violence is to feel like a person again, to rediscover their own sense of personhood and voice. This was what Hannah hoped the art projects would do for the women, enable a restoration of dignity.