Family Target, 2003

In Family Target, Banksy offers a chilling image of innocence under siege. A stencil-rendered family, a mother, father, and child, appear mid-step, hand-in-hand, emerging from a nondescript space. At the center of the composition, a red crosshair (unmistakably the sight of a weapon) is superimposed over the child’s head. The message is brutal, immediate, and unflinching: even the most vulnerable are not safe in a world where violence operates with calculated precision.

With his signature use of stark contrast, black spray paint against a white field, Banksy reduces the figures to near-abstractions. The anonymity of the family universalizes their plight: they could be anyone, anywhere. The father’s figure even resembles that of a soldier, possibly a nod to the paradox of protection becoming indistinguishable from threat.

The red crosshairs interrupt the stillness with clinical menace. This is not a chaotic battlefield at all, it is rather a deliberate execution zone. The title, Family Target, doubles as a grim pun: a literal targeting of a family, and the idea that family units themselves have become targets: in war zones, in surveillance states, in political rhetoric.

Whether read as commentary on the horrors of modern warfare, the refugee crisis, or the collateral damage of militarized borders, this work sits alongside Bomb Love and Napalm in Banksy’s repertoire of anti-war imagery. It’s art that does not moralize from a distance — it grabs the viewer by the conscience and refuses to let go.