Site News

Show Your Tattoo: The Survivor’s Ink Project

June 21st, 2011 by IfSheCryOut
Red Hawk tattoo

Red Hawk tattoo

Two of our authors, Elizabeth Grace Frank-Backman and Stephanie Pasquarelli have started a new project called The Survivor’s Ink Project.

The Survivor’s Ink Project is assembling a gallery of tattoos survivors of abuse and violence have gotten to celebrate their lives. The pictures will be posted in an on-line gallery here at If She Cry Out and also on the project’s facebook page.

The project showcases survivors as masters of transformation: turning the darkest of human experiences into lessons of hope, beauty, and power. One survivor’s tattoo reads the same both right side up and upside down as if to say “No reality, however upside down, can take away a survivor’s fundamental nature”.

Other tattoos show a warrior woman rising above rainbows, flowers twining, a hawk soaring, and a spirited horse rearing. Rarely are tattoos the same. No two stories are alike. The essential creativity of being human becomes ever clearer when we rise above the inconceivable and embrace life.

If you are a survivor of abuse or violence of any kind, e-mail us your photo and a brief paragraph explaining why you chose the tattoo and what it means to you. The tattoo can represent celebration of any kind: your journey, life, experiences, struggles, success’, or anything else that symbolizes being a survivor for you.

To submit a tattoo, please send the following to TheSurvivorsInkProject at gmail.com :

  • a photo of your tattoo
  • a paragraph explaining why you chose that tattoo and what it means to you (whatever you feel safe sharing).
  • the name or alias under which you would like to be associated with it – you are welcome to use either an alias or your own name, whatever you feel most comfortable with.
  • the country you live in (so eventually we can do a map of survivor tattoos around the world!)
  • optional: a web address/link that you want associated with your name or alias (blog, facebook,myspace).


If you don’t wish to send a tattoo, you can still support this project by

  • “like”ing the project on facebook: The Survivor’s Ink Project
  • sharing or emailing this post – see the buttons at the bottom of this post
  • telling a survivor you know about this project
  • if you work with survivors, letting your organization and colleagues know about this project
  • if you are a tattoo artist, telling your fellow artists and appropriate clients

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Site news: Promoting survivor activists

March 26th, 2010 by IfSheCryOut

As part of our goal of promoting the work of survivor activists, we have added several new categories to our resource section. These categories show case the work of survivors whose experiences have lead them to create works of art, start social entrepreneurship projects, collect stories of survivors, or write their own.

For more information, please check out our two new resource pages, available in a drop-down list under “Resources” in the If She Cry Out website menubar:

In the future we plan to followup with articles on individual activists, their artistic endeavors and the organizations they have started.

If you are a survivor of violent crime or a terror attack or are managing a project or organization started by one, please let us know what you are doing. For contact information, see the contact page.

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If She Cry Out YouTube Channel

January 22nd, 2010 by Elizabeth Grace Frank-Backman

If She Cry Out has put together a YouTube channel with songs that we hope will inspire, encourage, and empower.  In keeping with our philosophy of a multitude of voices, the channel contains a wide variety of musical styles and traditions:  instrumental, pop, folk, rap, gospel, blues, klezmer, and more.  Both secular and religious songs from many traditions are included.

The channel has several play lists, each covering a different emotional dimension of empowerment:

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Two meanings for “If she cry out”

January 1st, 2010 by Elizabeth Grace Frank-Backman

The name of this site has a double meaning. First it applies to the crime of rape. Second it applies to its aftermath.

The phrase “If she cry out” comes from a verse in book of Deuteronomy that became the quintessential definition of rape in the Jewish tradition: Deuteronomy 24:25-27. “If a man finds a betrothed girl in a field and seizes her and lies with her … it is like the case of a man who rises up against another man and kills him. He found her in a field, and though the betrothed girl cried out, there was none to save her.”

This verse happens to be a fairly good description of what happened to me. In fact the memory of this verse is what helped free me from my initial shock when the rapist forced his way into my car and announced his intent to rape me. It loosened my voice. I shouted “Fire, Fire” at the top of my lungs hoping that the people asleep in the houses across the street would hear. I have a very large voice, but even in my case there was none to hear me. (I had read that calling “Fire, Fire” was less likely to trigger the bystander effect – see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect).

But not all victims get to cry out. Under stress, our bodies are designed to fight, flee, or freeze. Most rape victims freeze.  Physical flight isn’t usually an option when someone picks a rape target, but some flee emotionally while leaving their bodies in the hands of rapists whom they are too frightened to fight.  And some victims never really had a choice: they were drunk, drugged, unconscious, or simply too young to understand what was happening to them.

But the crime itself is only the beginning of a story of rape.  The story continues long after the rapist has left the scene.  For most survivors it continues for years.   But this isn’t a death sentence or a permanent wound.  It gives us new options and hope.

Survivors and any who want to walk with them can still cry out after the crime. They do not need to be silent. They can cry out with their pain. They can cry out with their wisdom. They can cry out against injustice and hatred. They can cry with compassion for others who are wounded. They can cry out in the name of a common hope.

If we cry out together, if we cry out in many different voices, in many different art forms, in many different religions, with many different kinds of activism and creativity, our experience will create a tumult that the world can’t ignore. If we cry out survivor and victim together, if we cry out untouched and touched together, we can redeem the past and heal the future. If we cry out, we can write a new ending and be there to save each other.

The Site Founder

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About this blog

December 31st, 2009 by Elizabeth Grace Frank-Backman

This blog is about hope. It is about the will to find life in the darkest places. It is about surviving realities that must never be and yet were.

This blog is about difficult matters.  It is about rape, terror, and trauma, but it is also about the sanctity and holiness found in places that are too frightening to visit, even in the imagination. Although this blog starts with the experience of trauma, it is first and foremost about humanity: how we can make sense of things that should never ever be.

Far too often trauma is viewed as a medical condition to be overcome. In fact, trauma is a lens that brings into focus the deepest values we have as human beings. The goal of this blog is to explore this lens.

There will be no simple answers here. The lessons of trauma require all of human creativity.  Even then there are not enough words or images or sounds or actions to explain or evoke all of the wisdom that can be found for those who demand meaning from their experiences.

I write and so the first posts of this blog will express the meaning of trauma in words.  But hopefully others will join me and together we will draw on any discipline or art available to communicate what this experience means, what wisdom we gained when we looked through the lens of trauma.

Although rape will be the focus, from time to time this blog will discuss other kinds of interpersonal trauma. As with rape, all interpersonal trauma disrupts the delicate web of faith that binds us together into a human community and keeps us hopeful through the rough times of life. Even more than a lens, trauma is a furnace in which false hopes die and true hopes are refined.

This is a blog about reality, not as we wish it, but as it is. It is about how we can hold the reality of terror in one hand and the reality of hope in the other. It is about embracing one without denying the reality of the other. It is about life.

The Site Founder

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