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Clothesline Project Raises Awareness of ViolenceBy Tammy Daniels - October 14, 2007
 | | T-shirts dedicated to victims and survivors of violence line Sullivan Lounge. |
NORTH ADAMS - Shavonne Shippee isn't afraid to speak up when she sees someone being treated abusively. She'd faced off with a father threatening to belt his young daughter and aided a friend in a bad relationship. She didn't think of herself as a fearful person.
But when a stranger grabbed her, she found herself all but mute.
"I could speak up for children or for other women, but not for myself," she told the small group gathered at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts to talk about domestic violence and abuse.
That's not unusual, said Gail Bobin, a 1998 graduate of the college and battered women's advocate. Like Shippee, many women find themselves hesitant to speak up when they've been abused or assaulted. They often blame themselves for the situation, or fear losing homes or jobs.
That's what happened to Shippee. The MCLA student was working as a nanny when the family hired a contractor to do some work on their house. Shippee, home alone with the children, went out to introduce herself to the foreman. She shook his hand; he grabbed her in a hug and rubbed his face in her breasts. She ran into the house and huddled in a closet.
Her employers didn't take the situation seriously. They didn't want to complain to the contractor and they didn't understand why she feared being at the house when the man was working there. She didn't want to lose a well-paying job. So she fell silent.
It took her boyfriend and another friend to convince Shippee she was worth more than her job.
Women need friends for that support, said Bobin. "Until we can change the culture, people need to watch out for each other."
Since 1990, the annual Clothesline Project: Bearing Witness to Violence Against Women, inspired by the AIDS quilts, has sought to raise awareness about abusive relationships and violence. Started on Cape Cod, it was brought to MCLA by Bobins in 1995, when the former Berkshire County Commission declared April 25, 1995, Anti-Violence Day in Berkshire County. It is put on yearly by the college's Women's Center.
Battered women's advocate Gail Bobin talks about what men can do. |
The number of participants has varied depending on the timing and events. This year, rain forced the event inside Sullivan Lounge last week, where T-shirts decorated with designs and sayings about survivors and victims of violence were hung along the walls. The small group listened to Bobin and chatted informally afterward.
Bobin had hoped more men would attend because they hold the key to changing a cultural attitude that sees a woman as an object, not an individual. It's a cultural perspective that leads to assaults like that on Shippee, she said.
She told of a classroom presentation in which a researcher asks men to list on a blackboard how they would protect themselves from a sexual assault. That usually leads to joking among the men and little or no suggestions. The women, however, will fill up their side of the blackboard and the men's side as well.
Women live with the threat of violence, yet may minimize it as a way to feel they are safe; men may feel unaffected. But violence against women is a matter of civil rights, Bobin said, which affects everyone - family, friends and colleagues.
As a member of domestic violence task forces as part of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, Bobin noted the number of men - police officers and civic, community and religious leaders - who are working to end the violence.
Men must become allies in ways as simple as objecting to jokes about violence against women to treating such violence as the crime that it is, she said.
Student Shavonne Shippee gathers T-shirts. |
Men may feel uncomfortable about how their peers treat women yet say nothing, said Bobin. "That will continue as long as the focus remains on the victim."
For Shippee, talking about what happened to her was helpful.
"I feel like I have found my voice again. I really want to help others find theirs," she said.
The Women's Center will provide T-shirts to add to the Clothesline throughout October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Tammy Daniels can be reached at tdaniels@iberkshires.com
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