Mississippi State University students expressed their feelings on sexual assault and violence at the annual Clothesline Project.
Outreach and Sexual Assault Services hosted the event, held Tuesday through Thursday on the Drill Field. Participants wrote personal messages on a variety of colored T-shirts, each color representing a form of abuse, and hung them on a clothesline. Messages could have also been written in private and submitted by mail.
Beatrice Tatem, director of Outreach and Sexual Assault Services, said the T-shirts are cathartic.
“[The Clothesline Project] is an opportunity for women and men to express their feelings and thoughts around experiences that sometimes they are not able to verbalize,” she said.
LaWanda Swan, outreach coordinator and sexual assault advocate for OSAS, said she has been working on the Clothesline Project for three years and is impacted every year by what she reads on the shirts.
“You have the opportunity to catch a snapshot of people’s lives,” she said. “You catch people at different stages with handling and/or accepting what has happened to them, and how they’re going to move forward. You’re going to catch people who are more at peace with what has happened to them. You’re going to catch people who are still angry. You are going to catch people who are confused and honestly do not understand.”
White T-shirts represent those who have died from violence.
Some white T-shirts represent soldiers who have died in Afghanistan or Iraq, while others represent people who have been in violent relationships that ended in murder, Swan said.
Lavender or purple T-shirts are for men and women who have been attacked because of their sexual orientations.
Tatem said abuse toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is a recurring problem across the nation.
“People are at different stages in their reaction or in their response to the abuse that they have experienced — pretty much like the coming out phase,” she said. “Sometimes [the clothesline] is an opportunity to express what has happened as a result of their coming out.”
Red, pink and orange T-shirts are dedicated to survivors of rape, sexual abuse or assault.
One in four women who attend college will be sexually assaulted, Tatem said.
“What happens this time of the year is there are a lot of new people,” Tatem said. “They’re hooking up with different people, forming new relationships. Some people they know, some people they don’t know so well, so there’s a vulnerability. There’s a lack of awareness this time of year.”
The yellow or beige shirts represent those who have been physically, emotionally or sexually battered or abused.
The black T-shirts honor those who have been attacked for political reasons.
The blue and green shirts stand for incest and sexual assault, which is growing in number, Swan said.
All T-shirts created in the Clothesline Project have been put into the collection to be displayed again next year, Tatem said.
Swan said the Clothesline Project has grown tremendously over the past three years.
Tatem said the growing number of shirts does not represent a growing number of assaults on MSU’s campus but a growing awareness about sexual assault. She said MSU is on the forefront of institutions in the region when it comes to being proactive about educational programming and response on sexual assault.