A red shirt in the Clothesline Project represents the story of a survivor of rape. Each shirt is color-coded to specifically show the form of abuse that each person went through. The collection of shirts started in 1997.
The stranger held a knife as he lay on top of her in bed and threatened to kill her daughter if she screamed.
So Caroline McSweeney said she chose to endure it as he raped her.
“I just didn’t feel like giving up my life over sex,” McSweeney said of that early morning 20 years ago. “He wanted to (rape me) as sort of a calling card, as a statement that he won.”
She later testified against serial rapist Monette Johnson, who was sentenced to 159 years in prison.
But McSweeney woke up for months at 4 a.m., her body expecting another attack. She shot up like a zombie when her daughter tried to crawl in bed with her, underwent more than 18 months of HIV testing, and gained 40 pounds in what she said was a subconscious effort to look unappealing.
McSweeney will share her experience as a rape victim during Take Back the Night, an annual event programmed this year by the Office of Residential Life and the Clothesline Project at UCLA. The Clothesline Project consists of 15 graduate and undergraduate students dedicated to stopping sexual victimization and shattering silence around the topic, said creative director Troy Stephens.
Take Back the Night is the culmination of Clothesline Week. For the past three days, shirts have hung on wires strung across campus trees in Schoenberg and Perloff quads. Collected since 1997, the shirts are decorated by UCLA students and others with stories of sexual or domestic violence.
The color-coded clothing fluttering in the wind is sometimes hard to read. Most are yellow or red, with yellow standing for survivors of domestic or dating violence and red for survivors of rape.
One red shirt is simply covered in the word “No.” A white one offers words of love to a murdered sister. A blue one says, “You left your sin upon my skin. … Brother, you won’t get the best of me.”
Another red one is completely covered in words. It reads, “I wish I never would have met him. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent the last 14 years of my life lying, despising my body, being broken. … I never thought someone would hurt me. IT STILL HURTS.”
Take Back the Night will begin at 7 p.m. in De Neve Plaza Courtyard. Three speakers will address the crowd, and five performances will consist of dancing, singing and spoken word meant to empower people to take on the issue of sexual violence as their own, Stephens said. About 200 people are expected to attend.
The event will also provide information about legal and counseling services on campus and the rape treatment center in Santa Monica, which offers free services like medication and DNA testing, said Lexi Hradisky, ORL programmer for the event and a fourth-year communication studies student.
A candlelight vigil later that night will allow people in the crowd who have been victims to step up to the microphone and share their story. Afterward, attendees will march around the dormitories holding candles and singing chants.
Alaina Sudeith, program adviser and assistant resident director of De Neve Acacia-Birch, said the march attracts curiosity and can convince people to inform themselves about issues of sexual violence.
The misconceptions and stigma of rape still exists, McSweeney said. She said her friends used to say that as long as a girl kept her legs closed no man could get between them, and she said some people interpret failing to fight back hard enough as a form of permission.
“The main thing I want to bring up is if it has happened to someone, it’s a physical, not sexual act,” she said. “And it’s not something you should be ashamed about.”