In observance of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the student group Leaders in Interpersonal Violence Education (LIVE) organized a Clothesline Project this week, concluding April 4.

“There are T-shirts, and people can decorate the T-shirts with messages of support for survivors, and survivors can put stories or any sort of message they want on the T-shirt, and then the T-shirts are hung up on a clothesline,” LIVE’s Sexual Assault and Harassment Chair senior Alyssa Hunt said.

Nathalie Austin | Student Life

Students from the group Leaders in Interpersonal Violence Education (LIVE) promote the Clothesline
Project. LIVE organized the project this week in observance of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

In the past, Hunt says, the shirts were strung up outside of Edison courtyard by the Danforth University Center. This year, rather than doing T-shirts, LIVE is providing participants with cloth squares.

“We have these little fabric squares, ten-by-ten fabric squares, so people can come and write any sort of message that they want to on the fabric squares, and then we’re going to string them together like a clothesline as well,” Hunt said.

The Clothesline Project is a national project, started in Massachusetts in 1990, that has since spread all over the nation.

“The idea is that it’s a visual representation to bear witness to the violence in our communities and sort of raise awareness that this violence exists and that it’s a problem and that it’s something we need to address,” Hunt said. “LIVE has been doing the Clothesline Project for a few years now; we do it every spring.”

Hunt said that LIVE has “about 82 little ten-by-ten squares” for students to decorate.

“Hopefully we’ll get a lot of people to engage with it and fill it out,” Hunt said.

After they are hung out, the squares on the clothesline will continue to be displayed at other LIVE events during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Hunt said that she hopes the Clothesline Project and other activities for Sexual Assault Awareness Month will re-energize the Washington University community.

“It’s been almost a year since the Title Mine rally and a lot of the energy that was sort of gathered around campus on these issues, and I think there’s been a little bit of a lull between, so I’m hoping to really reinvigorate people about these issues with our programming this month,” Hunt said. “There are students who are involved in LIVE and who are really coming together to effect change on our campus. People are always looking for ways to make the school better and to push the administration to be better.”