“Bearing Witness to Violence Against Women”
The Clothesline Project (CLP) is a program started on Cape Cod, MA, in 1990 to address the issue of violence against women. It is a vehicle for women affected by violence to express their emotions by decorating a shirt. They then hang the shirt on a clothesline to be viewed by others as testimony to the problem of violence against women.
The shirts are color coded to show the form of abuse and whether the victim survived the abuse they experienced.
White represents women who died because of violence;
Yellow or beige represents battered or assaulted women;
Red, pink, and orange are for survivors of rape and sexual assault;
Blue and green t-shirts represent survivors of incest and sexual abuse;
Purple or lavender represents women attacked because of their sexual orientation;
Black is for women attacked for political reasons.