Clothesline Project

Monday was the twice-postponed-for-rain Second Day of BAS' Traveling Clothesline Project. This is an "event" that we hold every year during Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October). We string rope up between trees, poles in a public setting and we ask passersby to stop and write or draw some anti-domestic violence thoughts on a tee-shirt (we provide the shirts and the markers), and then we hang the shirts on the lines. The more shirts that go up, the more folks become interested, and it feeds on itself. The idea is to enable folks to air their dirty laundry, and to make public what was once considered a private issue.

On the 18th we ran the project in the Monsignor Del Valle Plaza, outside our Southern Boulevard office (at the juncture of Southern Boulevard, Hunts Point Ave and 163rd Street) and yesterday we ran it at Fordham Plaza (Third Ave and East Fordham Road). We hung 161 shirts the first day, and another 269 yesterday. Some of the shirts bore simple messages ("Stop the violence"), others included elaborate messages to former abusers. Some were in Spanish, some advised a turn towards Jesus, some had pictures or poems. It is powerful stuff to see a collaborative project like this, collaborated on by complete strangers who happen to be walking through a public plaza but who are interested in taking five or ten minutes to make a statement against domestic violence.

After seven years of watching DV survivors come through our office, seeking legal assistance, the cases still make me cringe. You just cannot get into the head of a DV survivor to understand why she (most often she) is where she is. This week's "case that defies the imagination": our client "Sue." She first came to us two years ago, pregnant with her second child, and tired of being beat on by her boyfriend. She was in our office every day for weeks, but ultimately decided not to follow through with the Order of Protection we helped her obtain. And then we didn't see her again until about six weeks ago. Still with the same abuser, and he had now moved several of his family members into their apartment, and they had locked Sue out of the apartment, depriving her not only of shelter, but of access to her kids, her HIV meds, and her psych meds (she is bipolar). We helped get her back into the apartment (which involved getting the family out), and she and boyfriend "came to an understanding," until he continued to withhold her psych meds, and then had her hospitalized when she inevitably had a psychotic episode. He then moved out, took the kids with him, and has now filed for an Order of Protection against her (a bullying tactic to keep the kids away from her). We're probably going to help her defend against the Order of Protection and fight for custody, but ACS might also have filed a neglect petition against her? Unclear as of right now.

You just can't make enough tee-shirts to deal with this kind of shit.