Depicting the Silent Impacts of Sexual Assault

Less than 1% of people who are sexually assaulted will ever get an opportunity to deliver a victim impact statement in court.

The Impact Project invites all survivors to create impact statements, regardless of the details of what happened to them, or how long ago it was. Everyone deserves to have their voice heard.  It doesn’t matter if you’ll never get your day in court, or if you don’t even want a day in court. You still have a right to say, ‘something happened to me and here is how it has affected my life.’ 

For survivors, we would like to this site to provide a safe place for you to share your own statement, if you choose to do so.  Creating and sharing your statement can be healing both for you, and for the people who read about your journey and find solace in the fact that other people are or have been where they are. For everyone who visits the site, we hope to show and educate people about the complex and long-term impacts of sexual assault. By transforming the impact statements shared through this site into a word cloud, we can use survivor’s own words to visually depict the commonalities of how this type of trauma impacts people’s lives. 

The image above is of a person sitting alone, because most of us rarely talk about what happened to us. Instead we actively strive to hide our stories and their impacts from the rest of the world. We learn to divert, avoid and compensate for the lasting consequences our traumas have left on our lives. But inside our minds and our bodies, we carry those consequences with us. The word cloud that fills the image is a visual representation of the silent thoughts, fears and worries we carry with us through our lives as victims of this type of trauma.

The Impact Project Image is a living piece that will evolve as more people share their voices and their journeys with us.