The Daily Campus

Issue date: 10/23/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Rochelle Baross

Colorful shirts with emotional messages have been hanging outside the Student Union, South Campus and Husky Village this week as way to inform students about violent acts against women.

The Clothesline Project is an international movement for healing and social change, according to the Clothesline Project's Web site. UConn participates every fall.

Anyone can choose to make a shirt in the Women's Center any time this week for it to be hung on the line. All the shirts are from students on our campus.

"It's easy to say that violence happens in other countries. The reality is it happens here. These shirts are stories from people on our campus," Mindy Brown, a 5th-semester English major said.

The shirts draw people's attention as they walk by and get students asking questions.

"It raises awareness about violence against women. A lot of people don't think it exists," said Victoria Flagg, a 5th-semester women studies major.

"People sometimes get emotional just while they are reading the shirts," Ana Petrill, a 5th-semester psychology major, said.

The shirts' different colors represent different meanings. White shirts are memorials for women who have died because of sexual violence; red, pink, or orange are for women who have been raped or sexually assaulted; yellow, beige, tan or brown are for battered or physically assaulted women; blue or green are for women who are survivors of incest or child abuse; purple are for women assaulted because of their sexual orientation; and black is an open color, for any message one wants to leave.

"The project draws attention to all types of violence against women because all the colors have the different meanings," Petrill said.

"These are issues that don't always get talked about, because they are painful and not easy to think about, Brown said. "Even when conversations do happen things are left out. There is a wide range of different types of violence that take place. The shirts allow individual people to present their personal story in a public way."

The project is not intended to be only for women. All genders are welcomed to create a shirt and read others stories.

"Men need to take a stand to not just avoid being violent themselves, but also to say that you can't do this either because we're all men," Brown said.

The project hopes to get all genders talking about the issue and allowing people to publicly reveal their individual stories.

The Clothesline Project was started in 1990 when The Cape Cod Women's Agenda in Massachusetts took a trip to the Vietnam Memorial where 58,000 men were killed during war. There were 51,000 women killed in that same time by violence from men.

Since then, the visual idea of the Clothesline Project has inspired between 50,000 and 60,000 women to create shirts all over the world.

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