American Heritage School

The Butterfly Project is a student led initiative at American Heritage School's Plantation, Florida campus, which seeks to spread awareness about past and modern day genocides that cause the suffering of millions of people of all ages around the world. Our core mission is to promote awareness, tolerance, and peace through education in school and the greater community. 

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Central to our efforts to redefine and personalize genocide education is the artwork and writing project. This website provides educators with a model to instill empathy and documents over 50 students' visceral reflections of genocide, identity, and intolerance.

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What is Genocide?

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"The term 'genocide' was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by combining geno, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, derived from the Latin word for killing. Lemkin developed the concept of genocide partly in response to the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in which he considered entire nations, and ethnic and religious groups, had been destroyed."

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The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect defines genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention.

 

"Article II: genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

(Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide)

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