Cali, Colombia – As the one sister to 9 brothers, Carmen Diaz loved a boisterous childhood within the port metropolis of Buenaventura, Colombia. Collectively along with her siblings, she would wreak havoc round the home or exit within the streets and kick a ragged ball round for hours.
“I adored taking part in soccer,” mentioned Diaz, who requested to be known as by a pseudonym.
However her joyful, rambunctious childhood got here to an finish when her uncle began to sexually abuse her, she mentioned. The assault continued over a number of events.
When she instructed her mother and father about what occurred, they refused to consider her and as an alternative accused her of mendacity. Feeling distraught, Diaz determined to run away from residence on the age of 13.
Diaz ended up sleeping on the streets of the close by metropolis of Cali and have become hooked on medication. Ultimately, she discovered shelter by means of the town’s social providers, which related her with assets for minors.
That’s how she found her lifeline: salsa dancing. It was a part of an experimental remedy mission run by the native nonprofit, Mi Cuerpo Es Mi Historia, a reputation that interprets to “My physique is my story”.
The mission combines salsa dancing and psychotherapy to assist survivors of sexual violence specific their feelings and course of their trauma over the course of a number of months.
“Dancing may help to heal trauma,” mentioned mission founder Martha Isabel Cordoba Arevalo, a psychologist and avid dancer who was born and raised in Cali, referred to as the world capital of salsa.
“When survivors don’t need to discuss what occurred to them, or if they don’t seem to be in a position to, motion provides them a special method of expression.”
Over the previous decade, Mi Cuerpo Es Mi Historia has labored with roughly 700 younger women, largely by means of referrals from metropolis providers. Remedy begins with efficiency courses, specializing in performing, singing or dancing.
Then, the following step is to let members discover matters they selected by means of efficiency methods. By the top of the programme, organisers hope the artwork might be an outlet for members to know and address their experiences.
Recovering from trauma, nevertheless, is rarely straightforward or easy. Arevalo remembers assembly Diaz, now 28, when she was solely a young person, newly referred to the programme. She noticed that Diaz appeared aggressive — harm by all that she had endured — and didn’t need to work together with the programme’s psychologists.
“I used to be afraid of males,” mentioned Diaz. “The male psychologists I spoke to, they made me scared.”
However Arevalo quickly found that Diaz had a pure expertise for salsa. Week by week, {the teenager} appeared extra relaxed.
The quick tempo of salsa’s tumbao beat stored Diaz’s thoughts — and her heels — busy, as she flicked throughout the dance flooring, her physique swaying to the sound of trumpets and timbales.
“After I was dancing, I felt free and blissful,” Diaz mentioned. “It was the perfect therapy for me. I don’t really feel like a sufferer any extra. I’m a survivor.”
A rising physique of analysis helps the declare that dance and motion can have advantages for the thoughts, in addition to the physique.
A overview of 41 studies printed within the journal Frontiers in Psychology in 2019 discovered that dance motion remedy diminished anxiousness and despair, “constantly” enhancing associated circumstances.
Dita Federman, a dance motion therapist who has researched sexual abuse, argues this unconventional therapy technique can attain some sufferers in methods different interventions can not.
“It may be essential in serving to some sufferers,” mentioned Federman. “Dance remedy can result in elevated coronary heart charge, utilizing coordinated motion and steadiness, and what occurs whereas dancing is that persons are extra prone to recall and specific previous reminiscences.”
However Arevalo cautioned that addressing sexual violence is extraordinarily complicated and that no easy resolution exists.
“You want time and assets, and also you want skilled professionals in an effort to make deep modifications or restorations of lives,” she mentioned. “Not everybody has that luxurious.”
Federman additionally warned that, in each kind of remedy, there’s a threat of re-traumatisation. Dance is not any exception.
“It ought to be executed very slowly, with out instantly questioning [the survivors] for emotional materials,” she mentioned. “If it comes up from them, then it comes up. However it shouldn’t be compelled.”
And whereas there was analysis into its efficacy, Federman mentioned information about dance motion remedy stays restricted due to the issue in acquiring permission to review survivors of sexual violence.
“There’s a lot we don’t but know,” she mentioned.
However proponents consider dance remedy might assist make small steps in responding to the stark ranges of gender-based violence in Colombia.
One third of ladies within the Latin American nation have suffered bodily or sexual violence by the hands of a companion, based on the United Nation’s World Database on Violence.
Colombia’s six-decade-long internal conflict has additionally contributed to excessive charges of sexual violence. In September, the Particular Jurisdiction for Peace — a courtroom set as much as examine crimes dedicated in the course of the battle — introduced that no less than 35,178 people had suffered gender-based violence between 1957 and 2016.
Proper-wing paramilitary groups had been accountable for the most important variety of incidents, at roughly 33 p.c. Girls made up the overwhelming majority of the victims, comprising 89 p.c general.
“The our bodies of ladies have been used as a goal of struggle,” mentioned Arevalo.
To scale back the chance of re-traumatisation, Arevalo avoids utilizing “direct” dance companions in her periods with younger survivors. As an alternative, the dancers be taught their steps in a bigger, coordinated group. And once they pair up, they usually use a way known as “mirroring”, whereby dancers replicate their companion’s strikes at a distance.
Arevalo mentioned there may be additionally loads of room for particular person improvisation in salsa, which might be danced alone in addition to with others.
Her nonprofit features a pathway for sexual assault survivors to change into salsa instructors themselves, to allow them to go alongside their methods to others — and even arrange their very own enterprise.
Sofia Murillo is among the many graduates of that programme. On a current December afternoon, she and her fellow instructor Alexander Patiño defined the essential salsa steps to about 25 vacationers in a packed dance studio lined with pale yellow and inexperienced tiles.
Cali’s model of salsa is famously fast-paced: Within the Seventies, it turned fashionable for DJs to play data at 45 revolutions per minute, a lot faster than the standard pace of 33rpm.
Confronted with Cali’s whip-fast beats — the galloping pulse of the bongos and cowbells seemingly unrelenting — Murillo’s college students struggled to maintain up. Their toe faucets and turns risked turning into collisions and crushed toes.
However by the top of her class, each one of many vacationers was in a position to cobble collectively a decent routine.
“I had unfavourable ideas up to now,” mentioned Murillo, 40, who turned a salsa instructor in 2023. “I used to be mistreated. However once I’m dancing, it’s completely different. I overlook all the things. I smile.”