Why Painting Animals Might be a Game-Changer for At-Risk Youth
Every single being on this planet wants to live a full and healthy life. That statement should be self-evident, but we’re living in a world where the poor, the disabled, the non-human, and other “others” are often made to feel that they don’t deserve even basic compassion. Here in Los Angeles at-risk youth face discrimination and institutional barriers every day. Statistically, children who were affected by violence growing up are likely to participate in it as adults.
I founded Art for Animals’ Sake, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit educating youth about the emotional lives of animals through creative expression, in part because as a photographer I’ve interviewed and worked with many troubled young people, and I’ve seen first-hand how as a society we’re writing them off. At Art for Animals’ Sake we take a unique approach to breaking generational cycles of violence. We focus mainly on art education for at-risk youth, with the goal that if we can build on the natural curiosity that kids have for animals, they’ll develop into people who are kind both to human and non-human animals.
Essentially, if you could stop abuse before it happen, if you can give at-risk youth a creative outlet, you could potentially help create a world where respect for every living thing is self-evident.
We choose to work with at-risk youth because many kids who abuse animals grow up to abuse their spouses or children as adults. That link was noticed at least as early as 1809 by French physician Philippe Pinel. Since then more and more studies have corroborated it, including many by investigators with no ties to the animal welfare movement. Anna C. Baldry, who specializes in the psychology of violence against women, found that “animal abuse is part of the cycle of violence,” regardless if children experienced violence by being abused by a parent, watching one parent abuse another, or even being bullied in school (Baldry 2003).
Similarly, a bulletin issued by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention connected violence-saturated childhoods, youth animal abuse, and later criminal activity (Ascione 2001). Animal abuse falls under a rubric of Conduct Disorder (CD), a mental disorder that also covers theft, vandalism, firesetting, assault, and rape. The bulletin’s author, Frank R. Ascione, described animal abuse as the first CD symptom to manifest itself in at-risk youth and recommended early intervention through compassion learning as a possible way to disrupt the cycle of violence.
Children often abuse animals because they’re experimenting or testing limits, not because they’ve set out to deliberately injure or kill. Not all “experimental” animal abusers who pull tails graduate to setting stray dogs on fire, but the majority of humans who grow up to willfully harm other humans pass through an experimental animal abuse stage. As the earliest stage of the earliest-presenting CD behavior, this is when intervention should take place.
Ascione was skeptical on “animal-assisted” therapy, and I would agree. Simply putting a kid who tortures cats into a room full of cats isn’t going to inspire a psychological breakthrough. Besides, this is not only an issue of animal victims – we’re trying to spare potential future human victims, too.
If we need to confront the cycle of violence at the point when at-risk youth start considering harming animals but the presence of animals alone isn’t enough, how can we reach them? Because of my background, I immediately thought of art.
At-risk youth have had little to no exposure either to art or to the idea that one should be compassionate to animals – let’s call it humane education.
Art is expression. It’s a way to tease out complex or repressed feelings and work them over. Having a creative outlet gives at-risk youth a way not only to cope with the trauma of violence but to create enduring works of beauty. Louis Armstrong and many other early jazz musicians grew up surrounded by poverty, violence, and discrimination, and somehow created a musical style that remains our country’s greatest contribution to world culture.
Art is also translation. As with a language, you can’t translate what makes a living being if you don’t understand it. Even 400 years after he painted The Mona Lisa, we wonder what Leonardo da Vinci was trying to show us with that famous smile. And we don’t try to figure it out by studying his blending technique but by asking ourselves what Lisa Gherardini must’ve been like.
If you examine a chicken, instead of seeing black feathers you’ll notice that there are many colors such as green, deep purple, and blue. We ask at-risk youth to notice these subtle differences and it starts a conversation.
Everyone can benefit from becoming more mindful of abusive behavior. To be honest, there are far less compassionate groups of people out there than the kids we work with – angry drivers, corrupt politicians, and insider traders, to name just a few. We focus on young people because our resources are limited and children with violent life trajectories have the most to gain from humane education.
Children haven’t had their sense of wonder knocked out of them yet. As adults, our lives are so complicated and our attention so committed to so many concerns. Whether we will violently harm someone just shouldn’t be one of them.
Citations:
Ascione, Frank R. “Animal Abuse and Youth Violence.” Juvenile Justice Bulletin, September 2001. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Baldry, Anna C. “Animal Abuse and Exposure to Interparental Violence in Italian Youth.” Journal of Interpaersonal Violence, Vol. 18, No. 3, March 2003. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
