Nowadays lots of young adults identify as childfree. This is not a bad thing on its own, but one of the reasons might be the traumatic experience people had in their childhood. Some people don't want to have children because they are afraid their child will suffer the same as they did. They don't want to be like their parents, but they don't know how to be different.
With this project, I aim to change how people pursue punishments, since I find it one of the most popular and accepted ways to humiliate a child. Of course, my project includes not only punishments, since it is important to show all forms of abuse. I want to bring attention to this topic, to show the feelings of children and adults, how abuse, unfortunately, becomes part of their everyday lives, what the consequences are, and what are the better and less traumatic ways to raise a child. All of this material is connected as a large collage filled with letters, stories, drawings, and pages from books in English and Russian, where visitors are able to add their own experiences and opinions.
The name of the project refers to famous Russian idiom “Казнить нельзя помиловать” or “Execute not pardon”, where one should choose where to place the comma, and by that decide the meaning of the com (execute, not pardon/execute not, pardon). Additionally it has almost the same meaning as name of the Russian-language podcast by pedagogue Dima Zicer, named “Любить нельзя воспитывать” which can be translated as “Love Not Discipline”.
Overall, “Punish Not Love” consists of 170 stories I have collected online on Russian social media via an anonymous questionnaire, where I have asked people about their childhood experiences and relations with their parents. It also has over 40 stories and drawings made by children aged 11-17, which I have collected personally from my former school in Dubai. The collage also includes approximately 140 childhood photos collected from adults (their own photos, not their kids) specifically for the project, a few diary pages from an anonymous author, some paragraphs from the books I have read and copies of crafts and drawings kids gifted their parents.
With this specific combination, I want to not only depict childhood stories on their own, but also to represent this world that lots of children live in. People tend to call childhood the best time of life and associate it with cartoons and ice cream, but it is important to remember that children often live in the mix of those ‘pony and rainbows’ while also facing different forms of abuse. And that is their reality. Children don’t know it is wrong, it is the only experience they ever had. Therefore I hope this project will change people’s opinion about the holiness of parents and childhood serenity, helping some to speak up and share their experiences. I want my project to influence some parents and help them to show love to their children, instead of punishing and disciplining them.
Content warning: Child abuse, sexual abuse, violence
Daryna Shliakhtova is a Russian-speaking artist from Ukraine who has spent most of her life in the UAE. Usually, she prefers to make digital humoristic and romantic short webcomics, only a few strips long each about her original characters or characters from cartoons. In the past few years, however, she has become interested in pedagogy, schools and parenting. Even while being in school Daryna had a feeling that there is something wrong with the educational system. After graduation she started to read books about different types of schooling that has developed into the interest of upbringing methodologies and children’s psychology, which also led to the childhood traumas and their influence on adult’s lifes. Daryna has been developing her interest on the topic in several artistic research projects where she, for example, looked at how punishments were depicted in art and conducted research among school students about their experiences and opinions on the topic of punishments. Today her goal is to display people’s emotions about their childhood and hopefully make the viewer think about different ways of upbringing, and maybe even change at least a few children’s lifes for the better.