Description:

This illustrated children’s book aims to highlight the ways in which children resist and respond to violence. Our goal is to reassert dignity for youth who are exposed to violence. With this short illustrated book, our hope is that it will help families and professionals to understand children who have experienced violence. This book is also made for those who may have perpetuated violence to understand their responsibility, as well as for children to begin healing and identifying their own responses and resistance to violence.

This book is dedicated to all the children, and their mothers, who have ever stayed at a Women’s Shelter. It is dedicated to children (and former children) everywhere who have despaired at violence, longed for justice and love, and resisted attacks on the spirit. It is dedicated to mothers who try to keep children safe and to fathers who are gentle in their relationships with women and children and firm in the struggle against male violence. It is written in homage to dignity, justice, and hope. It is one account of children’s suffering and to the victories that can be found in small acts of living.

The title of this book, Stanley on the Shoulders of Giants, comes from the idea of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, which is a metaphor of little people standing on the shoulders of giants and expresses the meaning of “discovering truth by building on previous discoveries”.