Stupid

The Weapon of Choice Project was conceived to provide a visual demonstration of the power of verbal abuse, and it is meant to provoke a conversation about the problems of domestic violence, child abuse, and bullying.

We presented each participant in the Weapon of Choice project with a list of hurtful words, and we asked them to choose a word that had significance to them (some volunteered words we didn’t think of). You’ll discover as you explore the photographs in this project that there were very powerful words on our list, yet for the younger children who participated, the word they identified as the worst word, the word they were shy to say aloud -- the word they only dared to whisper -- was “stupid.” This surprised us, and it serves as good lesson that you never know what words may have the most devastating impact on children.
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