The Power of Vision

I've been thinking a lot about something that came up during one of our discussions in the Philippines on the Love146 trip.  We were talking about the power of the visual experience for both good and evil.  On one side of the spectrum you have the viewing child pornography, which is abuse in and of itself, but which can then also be a gateway into physically abusing a trafficked child in a brothel situation.  

On the other side of the spectrum you have projects like Witness.org, which I have mentioned several times before, and videos like the Love146 history that was the initial motivator for me to become more involved.

I continue to think about this on the heels of another visual tie to child trafficking: a recent display of paintings created by children who were child slaves and abducted girls in Gulu, Uganda.  The children were given an art therapy session by New York artist and newly appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador to Combat Human Trafficking Ross Bleckner.  The children's pieces are now for sale in the Lehmann Gallery.  You can see some of them here

and a few at the end of the short video below, in which Nicholas Cage and Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon call for the end of human trafficking last month.

I remember a song that I had on a cassette tape as a little girl that said, "Be careful little eyes what you see."  How interesting that the simple decisions of what we choose to look at can have such an influence on the people we are turning out to be.