Clothesline Project starts conversation on local campus

St. Thomas University students decided to take a stand against sexual assault and rape culture this fall by hanging up shirts with painted messages on them.

The painted shirts were part of The Clothesline Project, an initiative brought to St. Thomas University by its Students’ Union’s Sexual Assault Prevention Committee, whose goal is to bring awareness of society’s rape culture. The ad hoc committee wants to encourage students to engage in positive actions promoting an end to sexual and domestic violence.

The Clothesline Project is their newest initiative. Earlier, they participated in Fredericton’s Take Back the Night, a community march protesting sexual and domestic violence. In the future, they plan to receive training provided by the Fredericton Sexual Assault Clinic about rape, sexual assault, and ways to help others or oneself in difficult or dangerous situations.

Amy Baldwin, one of the co-chairs of the Sexual Assault Prevention Committee, is not only excited about the awareness that the initiative brings to campus, but also its potential impact on those who have experienced sexual harassment and abuse.

“It gives survivors and people a way to have their message out there.”

Set up in James Dunn Hall, was a table with shirts, paint, and members of the committee stationed around the set-up. This was the hub of the Clothesline Project. Here, students could pick a shirt and paint on it with various symbolic colours. The colour white is a tribute to people who have died as a result of violence. The colour yellow is a tribute to survivors of physical assault and/or domestic violence. The colour red, pink, and orange are a homage to survivors of rape or sexual assault. Remaining colours are attributed to various violent acts such as childhood sexual abuse, attacks suffered due to perceived sexual orientation and verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse.

After students were finished and had written a statement on the shirt with the appropriate paint colour, students would then hang up their shirt on one of two parallel clotheslines on lower campus.

Even if they didn’t hang up a shirt, Baldwin said everyone was supportive of the project that was stationed in the busy James Dunn Hall on campus.

“It causes a really important conversation to happen.”

This is St. Thomas’ University’s first time installing the Clothesline Project; however, the idea originally had its start in a town in the United States in 1990.

It was around this time that statistics discovered that the same number of unnecessary deaths in the Vietnam War, its controversy still fresh in everyone’s minds, was almost equal in number to the number of women killed by their partners during those same years. A group of women in Massachusetts, appalled by these numbers, decided to formulate their own initiative to generate the same amount of scandal as the war deaths. They decided to create the Clothesline Project.

Since 1990, the Clothesline Project has been practiced worldwide and has gained a significant attention.

Now, St. Thomas University has decided to join the movement and students have noticed.