Change Attitude is a global foundation focusing on art and culture to raise awareness and increase people’s commitment to end abuse and sexual exploitation of children. I look out the car window when the silhouette of what appears to be a little boy at the age of six or seven appears. He’s standing alone in the yellow glare of a street light and he carries a small cloth sack on his back. It’s the
year of 1986, in the midst of the Chilean dictatorship, and it’s the unknown beginning of what 30 years later would become Change Attitude. The driver stops the car and I step out to approach the little boy. I ask him about his name and why he’s out here alone in the middle of the night. The boy tells me, with fear in his eyes; his name is Oscar and he doesn’t know why he’s out here all alone, and he doesn’t knows where he lives. I decide to take Oscar to a Catholic accommodation for boys, where he might get some rest during the few remaining hours of the night. I ask Oscar to climb in to the car when he bumps in to me and immediately ask for forgiveness; “Perdón, Perdón”. Those words, coming from Oscar, sounded as if he didn’t ask for forgiveness he bumped in to me, but for forgiveness that he ever existed at all. We finally arrive at the boys shelter where a staff member first refuse to lend Oscar a bed. He later accepts to let Oscar in, but only after I promised to come pick him up in the morning. I return as I promised and I’ back on the stairs of the accommodation home as soon as the sun is up, knocking on the same heavy wooden door as last night. When the door is finally opened, I tell the man my why I’m there – to pick up Oscar. He tells me Oscar is gone and no one knows where. I spend the next several days and nights driving through the streets of Concepción to look for Oscar, but he’s nowhere to be found. I failed to ever find him again, and I have never managed to figure out what happened to the one lonely boy named Oscar. The reason for my visit to Chile was to photograph and tell the world about the abandoned children. Roaming through endless nights and violent streets of so many towns and cities all over Chile, these children are constantly subjected to sexualized violence, one the most horrible crimes an adult can commit against children. The meeting with Oscar was so heartfelt, and touched the inner core of my soul on such a level it has never failed to leave or given me any kind of respite. Nor have I forgotten the other children, orphaned and vulnerable, that I have met on so many streets in so many cities all around the world working on my mission to touch the world with images of a childhood unthinkable to so many. I’m convinced that art can be used as the light which to follow in the struggle for a world of zero tolerance for sexualized violence against children. Art is the strongest tool we can use to break the silence – and visualize – the cruelty committed to children every minute, every day all around the world. There are answers to the questions of change, but none of them bears the sound of silence. I have sat to mission that I will never stop visualizing the issue of these brutal crimes committed against our children. How could I stand to look in to the eyes of my own children and grand children knowing I have done nothing to help building a world free from abuse and violence of any kind committed against them or any other children of the world? I am absolutely convinced that art and culture is some of the strongest tools we have to break the silence, and to tell the world about the cruel crimes committed against children every minute, every hour, every day. Silence doesn’t change anything. I’m convinced there’s ways to change the world to a better place and to eradicate sexual violence against our children. I see it as my duty, for as long as I live, to continue to tell the world about the crimes committed against children. It’s as simple as the fact that I could never live with myself if I did not do anything to help our children. If I wish my own children to have a good childhood, I have to wish for all the other children around the world to have the same. I founded Change Attitude in Sweden on a January morning in the year of 2011. The foundation’s mission is to use art and culture as tools to combat sexualized violence against children, and to create a world of zero tolerance for the criminality.
