A beautiful, pure-hearted young woman, Maleficent, has an idyllic life growing up in a peace-loving forest kingdom until one day when an invading army threatens the harmony of the land. Maleficent rises to protect her home from the land’s most brutal protector, but she ultimately suffers an act so brutal and ruthless that it turns her pure heart to stone. Fuelled by vengeance, Maleficent battles the new king of the land and, as a result, placed a curse upon his baby daughter Aurora. As a slightly different version of the tale Sleeping Beauty, this film focusses on the traditionally evil Maleficent and how an injustice that wounds her so deeply that the audience understands how she eventually ends up cursing the king’s baby. The core of this film is abuse, and how the abused have a choice of abusing others or overcoming and remaining loving, open people. The scene that expresses this theme is when Maleficent’s love interest betrays and violates her by drugging her and uses an iron chain to cut off her wings while she sleeps. Her wings were stolen by someone who she loved and trusted. As shocked as I was to recognize this scene is symbolic of rape and in a young child/family movie, I don’t see this as a bad thing to send a message of around the world that there is no disgrace in being a survivor of sexual violence - that the shame is on the aggressor. I think this message is really important and relevant in today’s society because although we all know rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment, human trafficking, child prostitution happens all the time, especially in countries in Africa when hundreds of girls go missing yet governments around the world don’t want to face the problem head on and address the issue because of their social appearances. The issue also lies with Europe and tourists, examples of this are the movie ‘Taken’ and ‘Eden’. People look away from the idea of faci