"Reaching Out: America"
Child Abuse Monument

Mail your hand to Janice Caine-Brewster
Friends of "Reaching Out: America"
37 Bay Park Terrace
Alameda, California 94502

A National Child Abuse Memorial/Monument

Victims and survivors of child abuse deserve a major memorial that can acknowledge and validate their lives and adversity. The monument would be a place of healing, remembrance and celebration of victories. "Reaching Out" America is proposed as two massive bronze figure measuring 10 by 30 feet and would include the collaborative contribution of survivors and their supporter from across the US.

 

Background

In 1990, sculptor Michael Irving, Ph.D., himself a survivor, initially conceived of a plan for a major national memorial monument for survivors of child abuse. Dr. Irving says:

"The major motivating force behind the desire to create a child abuse monument was the call to action of the witness. I was working with survivors of profound child abuse who many times shared terribly tragic stories of abuse. Also, as a child, I had witnessed other children being cruelly treated by sadistic adults.

I had thoughts about the need for a memorial to acknowledge and address these brutally grave acts against innocent and vulnerable children. The resolution of the experience of being witness called out for a more formal and permanent form of remembrance and memorial."

A visit to the Vietnam Wall and the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC helped Dr. Irving finalize his considerations of sculpting a child abuse memorial. For more than twelve years Dr. Irving worked with a large team to create and national child abuse monument in Canada.

It was apropos that one of the first sculpted quilt squares by a survivor for the initial memorial monument Dr. Irving designed stated, "I've been to Nam and I've been through child abuse, and child abuse was tougher".

In 2007 Dr. Irving and Janice Caine-Brewster began the formalizing efforts to create a completely US version of the child abuse monument "Reaching Out: America".

The child abuse memorial/monument for the US would follow the vision and collaborative creative process Dr. Irving pioneered in sculpting his first "Reaching Out" memorial of The Child Abuse Survivor Monument Project in Canada from 1996 to 2001.

Dr. Irving viewed there were many similarities between the wounds and war and the wounds of child abuse. That like war child abuse needed memorials for personal and social acknowledgment, validation and healing.

The words around a hand on a sculpted quilt square reads, "I've been to Nam and I've been through child abuse, and child abuse was tougher. (F)"

Michele, age 8, writes, "If child abuse won't stop, then war won't stop and there will be no peace in the world." Her HandPrint was engraved into the bonze of one Monument figure.