Breaking the silence

Somewhere in the US a woman is raped every two minutes, three women are murdered every day by their husbands or boyfriends, one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime and 13,485 children have been removed from their homes due to domestic violence.

According to the FBI, only 37 percent of all rapes are reported to the police.

Students at GCSU are encouraged to break the silence through the Clothesline Project. All 405 of the women participating in the project want to tell their stories.

The Clothesline Project unites survivors, or loved ones, who have suffered gender-based violence. This project gives these women a voice. Maybe now, someone will listen.

The Clothesline Project is a national project that originated in 1990 in Massachusetts with about 30 women. The women designed the project to essentially “air their dirty laundry.”

In 2003, GCSU started its own Clothesline Project with about 40 shirts. Each year since then, these shirts are displayed during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

The Women’s Resource Center has been organizing the Clothesline Project for the past few years and is assisted by its coordinator Jennifer Graham-Stephens. She feels very passionately about the project and thinks that all women that suffered should learn to speak out about it.

Graham-Stephens says she remembers all of the women who have made t-shirts.

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“I will never forget one woman’s story and her shirt, she painted a face on the front, and on the back she put ‘I will name you now, because I could not then.’ And she listed the three names of her rapists,” Graham-Stephens said. “She was gang raped by three men. On the face, she had sewn the lips shut. I will never forget her telling me that story; I will remember that shirt and her face probably for as long as I live.”

These women pour their lives onto these t-shirts, with phrases such as “I was 11, they took turns, shared me like a plaything,” or “It just took 15 minutes but it stole 13 years,” or “If my hair was only a few inches shorter I would have gotten away.”
One bright pink T-shirt by Roxanne Barnett displayed, “You don’t have to be perfect to be worth loving.”

Pink, orange and red shirts are reserved for women who have been raped or sexually assaulted.

“I was raped when I was five or so. I grew up feeling like I was only good for my body, or I wasn’t good at all,” Barnett says.
She designed that shirt last year and came back see it hanging again Monday.

“I look at this and it makes me want to cry that there are so many people that had to go through something like this,” Barnett says. “Women are beautiful and powerful, and I hate that people take advantage of that. Especially as a kid, that ruined my life. That messed my trust, my love and a lot of things.”

Another purpose of the Clothesline Project is to provide women with a support group. Often, suffering from gender-based violence can be isolating.

“I love the Clothesline Project so much because you get a chance to look at it and see that you’re not alone, that there are people out there that care and have been through it too.” Barnett says. “And (they) can help you because they survived this. There are some people who are better because they lived through it.”

Graham-Stephens agrees.

“So often women will make shirts and then they’ll say to me, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever told anybody about this; it’s the first time I’ve ever spoken out,’” Graham-Stephens said. “Every year when their shirt goes up they get to tell it again, they get to have a voice again. And we’ll have people who’ll walk through the shirts and say to me, ‘I always thought I was the only one this ever happened to.’ Then they point to one and say, ‘that’s exactly what happened to me.’”

Sharon Thatcher, an Alumnus that came to view the Clothesline Project, says she no longer wants to hide her abuse.

“It can happen to anybody,” Thatcher said. “I’m 66 years old and this (abuse) is not something that is new. Back (when I was in school), you just didn’t talk about it. You hid it and your mother wouldn’t say anything. I never could say anything until recently. (The project) really is needed so badly for women to come out because I don’t think the world realizes how prevalent (this abuse) is.”

Beginning at the age of three, Thatcher was raped repeatedly by her father and grandfather. Her shirt is green, the color for incest and child sexual abuse.

The shirts’ testimony to this violence surprised Kathryn Thompson, a junior political science major.

“It’s terrible what happened to the women, but I think it is very important for the victims of this to break the silence. Some of the stuff I read (on the T-shirts) was really shocking, it’s hard to believe that these women are walking down the streets beside us and that there are real faces that go along with each of these shirts,” Thompson said.

The project is just one more step towards healing these women’s wounds.

“What I’m working on is how (all my experiences have) made me now into a better more beautiful person, because I have more depth and more understanding,” Thatcher said. “Because of all of this horror, I guess it’s like if you put fertilizer on flowers. It’s often times manure, but it helps them grow and then they grow up beautiful.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 10 2008. 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