Using art to create dialogue and change the mainstream attitudes towards mens violence against women （藝術的力量：針對男性對女性暴力開啟對話並改變主流態度）

We have always fought to lecture and educate the public as well as employees at the social services and people who are already interested, in the matter of mens violence against women.
In 2015 our womens shelter began to investigate the possibility to reach other target groups, to make the violence against women visible in other contexts and to change attitudes. We won a price in our county as the educator of the people 2015, which gave us an economic opportunity to start our art project. We contacted a group of local female artists and asked them to make their own interpretation of mens violence against women. Six artists made different interpretations; paintings, satire, music, pictures, videos, light and sound installations with ceramics. The results were presented in adherence to International Womens day 2018 in a local theatre in the town where we live and work. Since then we´ve had an exhibition, with personnel present during the summer and in september we made it all the way in to the Swedish parliament with our art. We started our exhibition with a vernissage where comissioners of the parliament were invited, along with womens right activists. For four days we met politicians and special advisers to discuss mens violence against women and to promote changes both in the law and attitudes.
Other than this project we have also made full-sized paper silhouettes with quotations from the women we met during the years, and designed a paper bag with arranged violence against a famous local artist that we distributed to the public with help from local police, lawyers, politicans and prosecutors. All our different approaches is aiming towards one goal, to change attitudes regarding mens violence against women, to make it visible and to make people talk about it. In the end our hope is that the violence against women will stop.