Clothesline Project aims to educate about rape

Personal stories of rape, sexual violence, pain and survival
will be on display today in Schoenberg quad.

The stories will appear on dozens of T-shirts, painted by
survivors of sexual violence over the last six years at UCLA, the
Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center and the Sexual Assault Crisis
Agency in Long Beach.

Today through Thursday, the UCLA Clothesline Project will
display the shirts in an effort to expose the community to the
realities of sexual violence.

In the campaign against rape, education is of paramount
importance because sexual violence is often shrouded in a web of
taboos, myths and misconceptions, advocates and educators say.

“It is something that we choose not to actively
recognize,” said Lisa White, a fourth-year English and
women’s studies student and co-chair of this year’s
Clothesline Project.

“Our culture is structured in a way to allow us not to
recognize it and how prominent it is,” White said.

And sexual violence is dramatically under-reported, said
Christina Walsh, spokeswoman for the National Center on Domestic
and Sexual Violence. Walsh said only a small percentage of rapes
are reported, and those that are reported are very rarely
prosecuted, which in turn deters victims from coming forward.

Because rape is under-reported, statistics are difficult to pin
down, but the 2000 National College Women Sexual Victimization
Study estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of college women
were either raped or experienced an attempted rape during their
college years. And in 1992, The National Women’s Study found
that 84 percent of women who were raped did not report it to the
police.

Walsh said community education is a crucial part of dealing with
and combatting sexual violence. She said public education about
sexual violence increases the chances that a victim will have
someone supportive and helpful to talk to, and it increases the
chance of a fair trial when a rape is reported to the police.

She said the popular myths and misconceptions about sexual
violence decrease the likelihood of a fair trial, and “it is
very important to understand that we are educating
juries.”

And education is the main focus of the Clothesline Project.

“I think educating about the reality behind those
stereotypes is the first step to changing them,” White
said.

Jesse Gaskell, the other co-chair of this year’s
Clothesline Project, said the project’s mission is twofold:
to make the campus community realize that sexual violence affects
all social groups, genders and ethnicities, and help survivors
through the healing process.

“We offer survivors an outlet to turn something painful
into something productive,” said Gaskell, a fourth-year
international development studies student.

The Clothesline Project gives survivors of sexual violence a
chance to tell their stories by painting them on shirts, which are
later displayed in public places like college campuses. Family
members and friends of people who have died as a result of sexual
violence can also make shirts.

White said it makes a big difference for survivors to
“come out,” and the Clothesline Project allows people
to “address the dark places in our society.” She said
many people have told her they were survivors when they found out
about her involvement in the project, a fact which she takes to
mean that the project is working.

The numbers may confirm her feeling. Tina Oakland, director for
the UCLA Center for Women and Men, said the number of students who
come in for counseling goes up during the Clothesline Project.
Oakland called the Clothesline Project powerful and effective, both
for the community and for the people involved.

She said the sheer volume of individual stories that are
displayed makes it hard “to stick your head in the sand and
pretend that is it not a societal problem.” And several years
ago, when Oakland made a shirt for someone who died after being
pushed from a train, she found the experience unexpectedly
moving.

“One of the things about making a shirt is it goes back to
the emotional and tactile experiences we had as kids,” she
said. “That physical property seems to free up people; when
you look at the line, you can see that it is a cathartic and
freeing experience.”

For the duration of the project, there will be an enclosed tent
near the line where people can make shirts. Oakland said people may
also arrange to make shirts at the Center for Women and Men.

The shirts will be displayed from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the
Schoenberg quad today through Thursday. The program will culminate
with an event called “Take Back the Night” from 5 to 10
p.m. on Thursday with speakers, music, a speak-out, a candlelight
vigil and a march through Westwood.

This year, the project’s outreach committee has focused on
uniting the community around the problem of sexual violence and the
idea that “supporters don’t have to be
survivors,” White said.

The Center for Women and Men will also offer several workshops
during the Clothesline Project focusing on preventing sexual
violence. On Wednesday from 1 to 2 p.m., Matt Bean, men’s
programs and outreach coordinator for the UCLA Center for Women and
Men, will be leading a workshop called “How Men Can Be
Allies.”

“Basically, what it comes down to is trying to change
men’s perceptions of what it means to be a man,” Bean
said.

Bean said his program does not in any way attack men, but looks
at how men and women are socialized and how the socialization
process can lead to sexual violence.

The workshop aims to expose the social dogma that teaches men to
be dominating and physically overpowering. Bean said this binary
image of men as dominant and women as submissive, combined with a
number of misconceptions about sexual violence, or “rape
myths,” is one factor that allows rape to occur.

Bean said these rape myths ““ like the ideas that sexual
assault is provoked by provocative clothing or that going into
someone’s room is equivalent to consenting to sex ““
confuse people about what constitutes sexual violence.

“It has become so normalized that they don’t even
think of it as something wrong,” Bean said. He gave the
example that some men consider it normal to go out at night, get
drunk and have sex, but they sometimes fail to realize that if they
have sex with someone without consent, it is rape, even if that
person had been drinking.

He said he hopes to help men become comfortable to challenge
these myths by telling “counter-stories,” instead of
implicitly perpetuating them by remaining silent.

Bean has been leading the men-as-allies program for about a
year, but this year it will be run concurrently with the
Clothesline Project for the first time.

Oakland said reaching out to men is essential because, though
most men would never commit sexual violence, most perpetrators are
men. She said men can combat sexual violence by monitoring their
own behavior, their friends’ behavior and being willing to
ask questions before initiating sex.

“Often what sexual violence educators talk about is
danger-mitigation because they are not stopping the act,” she
said. “They are really talking about how to reduce the
possibility of harm rather than talking about changing attitudes
that create a rape culture in the first place. That is putting the
cart before the horse.”

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *