The girl who took this photo was once bullied herself because her parents could not afford to give her a morning snack. | Image: Sylvia Garcia Delahaye and Valérie Frossard

No snack, no playtime is the title of this image produced as part of the ‘My voice in pictures’ project under the supervision of Sylvia Garcia Delahaye, a social worker and professor at the Geneva School of Social Work. Its aim is to illustrate child poverty in Switzerland. Its originality lies in the fact that it was produced by children aged 7–11 years as part of a participatory methodology aimed at ensuring their voices are heard.

The issue of food and teasing those who do not have a snack at playtime is at the heart of this work submitted to the 2023 SNSF Science Picture Competition. A child familiar with such bullying imagined the scene and took the picture under the supervision of a professional photographer. In this image, as in all the others in the series, the protagonists wear masks. Garcia Delahaye points out that they have a double function: on the one hand, to guarantee the anonymity of those who have posed, and on the other hand, to render the emotions portrayed more understandable through explicit drawings. Garcia Delahaye has conducted a lot of work on child poverty and she admits she was surprised to see the children raise the issue of snacking at breaktime in connection with poverty. For her, it is a sign that the right to food should be part of the school curriculum in Switzerland, as it is in some so-called ‘poor’ countries.

The children took photos to appeal to adults: they no longer want to be bullied at school because of poverty. For her part, the girl who took this photo insisted on the importance of working on oneself when being the victim of mockery in order to realise that the malice of others has nothing to do with her. “It was this distancing work that enabled her to tell her story in pictures”, says Garcia Delahaye.