When Grace Brown was 19 she came up with an idea to change the way the world deals with sexual assault, and thus, Project Unbreakable was born.
For the project, Brown photographs and also accepts submissions of photos of people who were sexually assaulted.
In the photos, they are holding posters with quotes from their attackers written on them.
Brown is bringing these photographs to Carleton University Feb. 12, as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Week, organized by Equity Services in conjunction with Carleton University Students’ Association and other student groups. The week runs Feb. 10-14.
For many people, she said the project helps them feel less isolated and alone.
“It’s a way of letting go, I think, for them,” she said.
“I get emails from people saying how much it’s helped them, which is really incredible because I didn’t expect that. I didn’t know if it would do anything really. It’s really a way of taking back the words, I guess.”
Brown started the project a little over two years ago, in the fall of 2011.
She said while she has never been sexually assaulted, she had often heard the stories of the people around her.
What really sparked the idea in Brown was hearing a close friend’s story during a night out. Hearing that particular story really affected her and when Brown got home that night, she said she counted the number of people she knew who were sexually assaulted.
When she woke up the next day, she said she had the idea for Project Unbreakable.
Brown said she had no idea how much her project would grow. She believed it would remain a small art project, but her website now contains over 1,500 photos, with new ones coming in every day.
Brown said her main reason for starting the project was to teach people who have not been sexually assaulted to recognize that it can happen all over the map, and to show them it is more common than they would think.
Brown has also started travelling to colleges and universities to speak about sexual assault and her experiences with Project Unbreakable.
She said she hopes her visits will bring awareness to the issue of sexual assault and initiate a conversation about the topic, and like the photos, decrease the isolation people experience.
Project Unbreakable humanizes the experiences that people who have been sexually assaulted go through in a way that statistics don’t, she said.
“It puts a person behind those statistics and makes [the statistics] a little less dry,” she said.
She said she hopes more institutions will take on the project with their students and make it their own, and that it will continue to expand.
The event at Carleton will be sanctioned off with trigger warnings and support workers will be available for students.
