How photographer Megan Bowers-Vette got 50 sex abuse survivors to speak out

How photographer Megan Bowers-Vette got 50 sex abuse survivors to speak out

by Julie Hill

Published in Paperboy, 21 December, 2017

Megan Bowers-Vette and her husband Nicholas Vette, photographed by Tracey Stevens.

Megan Bowers-Vette survived childhood abuse. Now, the “fighty and fuck you” photographer is encouraging others to speak out about sexual abuse, and taking these stories to a national audience.

“I don’t know who I was before the abuse,” writes Megan Bowers-Vette in the foreword to her book Us, in which 50 rape and sexual abuse survivors tell their stories. “I was a little kid. It is in my memory as far back as my memory goes.”

Up to a third of all girls in this country, and one in five boys, are subjected to an unwanted sexual experience by the age of 16. But we rarely talk about it. And in recent years, funding for agencies like Rape Crisis and Women’s Refuge has been severely cut. So those who suffer do so alone, and in silence. “My initial idea is if it happens to one in three women, that’s a hell of a lot of women,” says Bowers-Vette, a fashion photographer. “So there’s a potential to make a community.”

Read the full article on the Stuff website.

Read the PhotoForum review of Megan Bowers-Vette’s “Us” project.