Airing GCSU’s dirty laundry

     The Women’s Resource Center hosted The Clothesline Project from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2 to raise awareness about domestic violence and honor its victims and survivors.
     Red, pink, yellow, black, brown, white, grey, purple, blue and green t-shirts clung to clotheslines tied from tree to tree across the lawn of Front Campus.
     “We have 367 shirts in the collection that we’ve been building since 2003,” Jennifer Graham Stephens, the women’s resource center coordinator, said. Every year new shirts are added. The first year we started with some 40 shirts and now we have over 300.”
     The Clothesline Project is a national grassroots project that first started in Massachusetts in 1990 when a group of women realized that violence was a problem in their community.
      “They wanted to stop it, raise awareness about it, and educate people about it. They wanted to do something people could contribute to,” Stephens said. “The women realized that throughout time women have talked to each other and shared news while they were hanging out their laundry and so the idea was born that they would decorate shirts and hang them on a clothesline to air society’s dirty laundry.”
     The Clothesline Project was started on GCSU’s campus in the spring of 2003 by Graham-Stephens, fellow student Jennifer Lindenberger, and Dr. Susan Cummings.
     “Jennifer Lindenberger and I went up to Emory and borrowed some of their shirts for the initial display and we had about 40 shirts made on our campus that year,” Stephens said. “We moved it to the fall to coincide with Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We’ve done it every year since then.”
     The Clothesline Project was designed to raise awareness about all forms of gender based violence including rape, domestic violence, emotional abuse, sexual assault, child molestation, incest and more.
     Each color represents a different form of gender based violence. White honors the memory of women and children who died as a result of intimate partner abuse.
     Yellow and beige represent partner violence. Grey represents emotional abuse. Red and pink symbolize sexual assault or rape. Blue and green represent child sexual abuse or incest. Purple represents women attacked because of sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation.
     Black shirts symbolize women attacked because of a disability. Brown shirts represent women attacked based on their religious beliefs or perceived religious beliefs.
     In 2006, GCSU Senior Chelsea Bruner decorated a grey t-shirt for the emotional abuse she has suffered throughout her life.
    “It was my dad and as early as I can remember it was always there. It was really how I thought all fathers acted for a long time,” Bruner said. “He would tell my sister she was a mistake. He would tell us we weren’t any good, how we’d never amount to anything.”
     “A lot of people don’t believe emotional abuse is a type of violence, that it’s not as valid as rape or physical violence, but it impacts such a large part of your life. I know I still haven’t gotten over it and I don’t think I ever will,” Bruner continued.
     Callie Boteler, a community health education major and volunteer for the project, discussed the abusive relationship her sister struggled to get out of.
     “She had a very abusive boyfriend at a very early age. He was very controlling, always had to know what she was doing,” said Boteler.
     Boteler said the relationship started with emotional abuse but  soon escalated to physical violence.
     “She would come home with bruises on her back and she would try to hide them.”
     Boteler’s family took out a restraining order against her sister’s boyfriend and moved two times to get away from him.
     Sociology instructor Michael Ramirez observed the t-shirts on display and was moved by the project.
     “It’s pretty amazing to see all the images and all of the words here and to know that this really is going on. We hear about it all the time but it’s distanced from reality.”
     Ramirez said the Clothesline Project makes the struggle against domestic abuse more realistic and helps people to understand this really is a problem.
     “It would be fabulous if we didn’t have to do these kinds of awareness projects, and we didn’t have to educate people that yes partner violence happens, yes every nine seconds a woman is battered in the US, and yes 1 in 4 college women will be sexually assaulted during their undergraduate experience,” Graham-Stephens said. “I would love to see the day when we don’t have to do a Clothesline Project anymore because women aren’t victimized because they’re women.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 1 2007. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry