Photographs, with their immediacy and verisimilitude, are the usual means of illustrating a news story and are a compelling part of TIME'S content every week. But for some stories, on the arcane complexities of arms control or international economics, for instance, or the abstractions of intellectual endeavor and emotional response, photography can seem too realistic, too specific to reflect and enhance the subject's nuances. For these stories, the editors often turn to the art world to solicit original work, including drawings, paintings, collages and prints, that can better evoke the meaning of the text. The Essay section is, by its nature, one that regularly employs such illustration. Occasionally a cover story lends itself more to art work than to photography. In June, for example, to accompany the Medicine article on stress, Eugene Mihaesco contributed several drawings depicting its deleterious effects. A March cover story on tax cheating was illustrated by Guy Billout, and one in January on the international "debt bomb" used drawings by David Suter. This week's cover subject, the alarming growth and extent of personal violence, especially within families and among people who know each other, was another such opportunity. Says Deputy Art Director Irene Ramp: "We wanted to convey the sense of violence and violation, the shame and helplessness of being a victim, without horrifying the reader or sensationalizing the victims. Art work had the advantage of being able to distill the emotional impact and move it from the too realistic to the abstract."

To achieve those aims for the cover and the inside illustrations, Ramp chose Matt Mahurin, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., who has previously contributed drawings to the Op-Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Mahurin, 24, started by taking photographs, then worked paint and emulsion onto the prints, using a minimal amount of color and leaving much of the photographs visible. "I wanted to create a dreamlike effect," he says, "the feeling of seeing a photograph without the immediacy." Mahurin, who has always wanted to focus artistically on political and social issues, gave the assignment, his first for TIME, an extra measure of care. "I thought it was important to get the emotion across," he says. "The illustrations had to be uncomfortable and disturbing." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.