Orange May Activities
During the month of May, as a part of the overall “Orange May” Campaign, our team worked daily at our Prevention Projects in Rio de Janeiro and Juazeiro do Norte. They taught our children about “safe touch”, using art therapy to help them process any trauma they have endured, and giving them a “safe space” to share openly about what they have gone through.
Rio de Janeiro
In Rio de Janeiro, we used different activities such as drawing, painting, and teaching to help bring further awareness to the issue of child abuse and exploitation.
For one activity our team gave the younger children a drawing with a doll. On the doll, they had to paint the traffic light signal on its body, showing “green” for areas that were “safe” – such as a pat on the head, “yellow” indicating, “slow down, that’s not safe”, and “red” showing areas that should not be touched. This activity served as a great way to really reinforce what they were being taught in regards to “safe touch”.
Through this activity, some children actually opened up and showed our team that they had already been touched in inappropriate places. Our team was already aware that some of the children who shared had already been touched inappropriately in the past, but there were other children who opened up that we were unaware of. Our team saved these drawings so that the psychologist can address these children individually to investigate more into what happened in each of these situations.
Juazeiro do Norte
In addition to the ongoing Orange May activities, our team in Juazeiro do Norte also partnered with City Hall. We worked with the staff and provided training specifically for individuals who work in defending and protecting the rights of children and teenagers.
Our team also distributed food baskets, hosted a special Mother’s Day event in conjunction with the campaign, held multiple events in the community and at the local university in addition to presenting a drama at multiple schools and churches – all with the goal of helping to bring attention to the issue of child abuse and raise awareness to the reality that is faced by some many children and teenagers every single day.
