Photos
One of the t-shirts made by a victim of domestic violence for the Clothesline Project.
By Johanna Crosby
The Cape Codder
Posted Mar 16, 2010 @ 08:10 AM
CAPE COD —
Carol Chichetto was devastated when she saw the first Clothesline Project.
The artwork and words on the 13 shirts hanging on a clothesline in the Hyannis Village Green told the stories of women who had been battered and emotionally or sexually abused. What hurt even more is that many of the shirts were created by Cape women who were her friends.
“I realized the pain my friends had gone through and I never knew anything about it. … You weren’t allowed to talk about it (violence) then,” she recalled.
A couple of months later Chichetto, who lives in Brewster, began having crying bouts. The shirts had stirred up repressed memories of a childhood marred by violence.
“The Clothesline Project saved my life,” she says. “It brought to the forefront things I didn’t know I had locked in there.”
Chichetto has been using that painful energy to reach out to other survivors of violence as the director of education and outreach for the Clothesline Project Inc., which is marking its 20th anniversary this year. Operating under the motto “Break the Silence – End the Violence,” the mission of the project is to increase the awareness of the impact of violence against women, a problem that is staggering.
According to figures from the National Victims Center, the U.S. Justice Department, and the National Battered Women’s Clearinghouse, every day in the United States a woman is battered every nine to 12 seconds, more than one woman is raped, and four to six women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends.
“It’s hard to know if the violence is getting worse or if more women are reporting it,” says Elenita Muniz of Brewster, one of the founders of the Clothesline Project Inc.
The grassroots project was started in 1990 by a coalition of about a dozen women, many of whom were survivors of violence themselves.
“We wanted to raise awareness on a hidden problem,” Muniz says. “It does happen here and it happens a lot.”
Local statistics are hard to come by. Yet the Cape is known to have to the highest level of domestic violence in the state for an area of its size and population, Chichetto says, possibly because of the stresses of its seasonal economy and the easy access to drugs and alcohol.
Muniz says a catalyst for the women’s coalition was the Vietnam War. She recalls being moved by the traveling half-size model of the Wall, which came to the Hyannis Village Green. The monument honors the 58,000 soldiers killed during the conflict. She was struck by the fact that during that same period 51,000 women were murdered, primarily by the men who supposedly loved them.
“Where is our wall?” she remembers thinking.
Inspired by the AIDS quilt, another founder, visual artist Rachel Carey-Harper, came up with the idea of letting women express their emotions by designing shirts and hanging them on a clothesline for others to see.
Using a clothesline as a healing and educational tool “seemed simple and perfect,” Muniz says. Traditionally, women were always the ones to do the wash and used to talk over the clothesline. Symbolically, the clothesline represents an airing of society’s “dirty laundry.”
Shirt-making is not only a powerful therapeutic tool that helps survivors of assault, incest and rape heal from their pain, Chichetto says, but is also a way for observers to understand their pain.
“It allows women to know they aren’t alone and for people to understand the devastating impact of this type of violence and the enormity of it,” she says.
Family and friends of women who died as a result of violence can also express their loss by decorating shirts.
The Clothesline Project made its debut on the Hyannis Village Green in October 1990 during the annual “Take Back the Night” march and rally. Women were invited to create their own shirts. By the end of the day 31 shirts were completed for the next display. But the momentum didn’t stop there. The tiny grassroots project has spawned an international movement. Twenty years and tens of thousands of shirts later, there are an estimated 500 Clothesline Projects in 41 states and five countries with two to three new projects starting up every week.
“It’s been incredibly successful” thanks largely to word of mouth, says Chichetto.
“We had no idea it would spread,” says Muniz, who brought a sample project of 30 shirts to Palestine in March of 2009. More than 6,000 shirts were gathered for a national display on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1995.
Both women have seen progress and changes in attitudes regarding violence against women since the Clothesline Project began.
“There is a lot more awareness and support,” Muniz says.
Laws have been passed to help keep women safe, including the battered women’s defense. Before, restraining orders were hard to get, Chichetto says. Now law enforcement officers are trained to intervene in domestic violence cases.
Yet, Chichetto believes the best hope for stopping violence against women is getting the message out to the younger generation. Since 1995 she’s been conducting interactive workshops on teen dating violence in local middle schools and high schools. Thanks to education in the schools, she sees a change in attitudes.
“The younger the person is who gets this information the better the chance of changing society,” she says.
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