Our Faces – Our Stories

We are creating an online platform that spotlights an important part of Swiss social history: compulsory social measures and placements. Several 100,000 people have been affected by this.

Our Faces – Our Stories centres on people who have experienced compulsory social measures and placements and on their family environment.

The experiences of contract children, foster children or children placed in care and of administrative detention or adoption have long-lasting effects. The same is true for compulsory abortion, sterilisation or castration. They affect a person‘s entire life as well as their familial and social environment – over generations and to the present day.

Many of the people concerned still have a hard time talking about their experiences.

Seeing, hearing and understanding: Visit our German website as of October 5, 2022.

The english version is in the making.

As of early October 2022, our multimedia online platform presents 32 contemporary witnesses speaking in video footages about their experiences. They show traumatising, problematic and also empowering experiences of people concerned, partners, children and professionals.

We set their experiences in a historical context, showing the issue of compulsory measures and placements in all its depth.

Our Faces – Our Stories is the first participatory collaboration between people concerned and historians.