Students in English professor Michelle Sayset’s Writing and Rhetoric II: Writing Women Safe course banded together to create awareness for the ongoing issue of violence against women. Columbia’s annual Clothesline Project event was held on Nov. 4 in the Hokin Annex, in the Wabash Campus Building, 623 S. Wabash Ave.

The event offered a table of homemade baked goods, bracelets and ribbons created to raise awareness. All items were made by students of the class and reasonably priced. Proceeds were donated to Family Rescue, a local organization that assists women and children in crisis. The comprehensive program offers shelter, transitional housing and workshops to help women become economically stable and help children affected by the violence.

The Clothesline Project was started by a group of women in Cape Cod, Mass. , who had seen the AIDS quilt display and questioned why there wasn’t a memorial for women who have lost their lives due to domestic violence. Sayset said the concept behind the project is more than just the feminine notion of hanging clothes on a clothesline—it is done to raise awareness through survivors of this violence to tell their stories on T-shirts.

To make a bolder statement, the participants of the event were all dressed in purple, which is the color that represents domestic violence awareness.

An assortment of colored T-shirts made by students and members of the Family Rescue shelter lined the room and displayed stories of women who have either lost their lives or been affected themselves. T-shirts were also crafted by friends and family of those who have witnessed the abuse firsthand. The stories on the shirts varied—some had personal family photos attached, others wrote detailed accounts of what happened and several exhibited a blunt message of “No Means No.”

Iris Velardo, a sophomore journalism major, said writing these messages is a good way for the women to handle their grief.

“The people that make the T-shirts use it as a sign to release their grief,” Velardo said. “It’s like a form of medication, so they had a way to share their pain to talk about in a positive and creative way.”

Performers and guest speakers let their voices be heard through spoken word and acoustic performance. The guest speakers included Honah Kim from KAN-Win, who gave the perspective of domestic violence in the Asian-American community, Tara Dabney of Family Rescue, Susie Moya from Metro Family Services and Eva Ball from Rape Victim Advocates.

Forty-seven white chairs faced the stage for guests to sit, representing the number of deaths this year due to domestic violence to acting as a “stand in” for the women that could not make their presence known.

Sayset was involved with The Clothesline Project while she studied at Illinois State University with their women’s coalition. She was asked to teach a course at Columbia that focused on domestic violence and thought it would be a great project for students to work on because it draws on their creative energies.

“It’s important for people to know that there are so many victims of domestic violence, especially those that are survivors,” Sayset said. “It’s sort of a healing thing to know that you’re not alone and it’s important to have a public forum. It’s this public display, you can’t deny these stories—they’re right there in the public’s view, which makes the issues more visible.”

The event was student-initiated and one of the requirements of the course, in order to get the students civically engaged, is to work on community service. The students organized the project themselves—they divided the workload among committees chosen to spread the word, recruited performers for the event, organized the bake sale for Family Rescue, collected T-shirts and ran the T-shirt-making workshops.

One of the performers who spoke out against domestic violence was motivational speaker and spoken word artist Awthentik. Awthentik’s poetry speaks to people that not only have witnessed domestic violence, but who are also battling with internal conflicts.

“So many people have so much hatred and sadness and I speak for them,” Awthentik said. “A lot of people are being victims and this is one way to take a stand. People can say, ‘Yes, my mother or father was a victim,’ but when you see it, it’s a different kind of thing to see, so I think this type of event definitely raises awareness to the issue.”