Tears welled in my eyes as I walked by the countless shirts. “Inside a battered heart is a woman with strength and courage… Break the chains.” I paused. I froze. The words resonated in my mind, processing the pleas and words that each shirt had on it. The images of the drawings on the shirts, melancholic and infuriating.

October is national domestic violence awareness month and the University of North Dakota puts on an event to promote the awareness known as the ‘Clothesline project.’ They hang shirts on clotheslines of those affected by domestic abuse and sexual assault of all ages. They have noises representing sounds of statistics. Sounds and noises that occur way too often.

I walked by another shirt and a bell rang through the silence. It represented a woman who died as a result of intimate, personal violence. The longer I was in the room reading the shirts, the more it impacted me. I was confused and angry. What would influence an individual to find it okay to physically hurt a human being? What would influence an individual to find it okay to cause mental and emotional pain to an individual- specifically someone they may know, love, and cherish? These questions rang through my head as I walked by more shirts.

“Freedom is my dream” was sprawled on another shirt. Why do we as a society have to live in fear? Why do we need to be imprisoned by our fears that something utterly tragic and traumatizing could happen at any moment- in school, at church, at home? A whistle interrupted my internal struggle to keep my sanity- a reported rape (every minute, more than one woman reports rape). This led to more confusion. Rape? A whistle every minute for more than one report reported? I didn’t understand. The continuous whistling played over and over again.

I was angry at this point. Maybe angry wasn’t the best term. I was livid. It kept going off. More reports kept coming in. Thoughts of current news around the world ran through my mind. It was every minute. Every minute I stood there looking at these shirts, more women were getting raped and more reports were unacknowledged. More judges asking victims if they were asking for it or what they were wearing. Why does this matter? If I was asking for it, would I be reporting this as rape? Why should it matter what I was wearing? Does wearing sweatpants and a long sleeve shirt really promote the idea that I want to be physically hurt? Emotionally hurt? Mentally hurt? Was that child on the playground begging for what was about to happen to them? Is the bruise on my face screaming that I wanted it there on my free will?

“Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Stretched across a shirt. Tears started falling down my face. This individual’s shirt had such an impact on me. This person’s wisdom awed me. They can’t change their past but they can influence the future. They can have a say. They don’t have to be alone or be silenced. I realized that domestic violence and sexual assault is a topic that we don’t talk about because it is so controversial, but what this person is trying to say is something that we need to do. We, as a society, have to talk about the topics that aren’t light-hearted. We need to talk about the issues at hand. We need to talk about the fact that a woman dies every 10-12 minutes from intimate or personal violence. We need to talk about rape. We need to talk so those scared to speak up know that they are not alone. People don’t have to dream about their freedom, they can live it.

I finished reading every single shirt from front to back. I heard the gong, whistle, and bell. I walked around the dinner table and read about the fatalities of victims taken too soon. I felt the mood throughout the room- melancholic, uneasy, tense. I learned of the people's struggles and tragic endings and I learned of people’s success. The very last shirt I read gave me optimism about the future of domestic violence and sexual assault; “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” These events are tragedies that need to stop. We need to learn to sail and we need to start this by bringing awareness that this is a problem and it needs to be faced. We need to break the chains so the ships can sail.