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Sorority uses week to launder social dilemmas

Junior Michelle Crenshaw; senior Alex Rojo and sophomore Tressi Chun helped promote the national Clothesline Project in which Iota Delta encouraged the La Verne community to "air out society's dirty laundry." Students selected shirts that represented a specific type of violence against women or children and used puffy paints to design a shirt expressing their feelings against that type of violence. / photo by Jaime Ortega
Junior Michelle Crenshaw; senior Alex Rojo and sophomore Tressi Chun helped promote the national Clothesline Project in which Iota Delta encouraged the La Verne community to “air out society’s dirty laundry.” Students selected shirts that represented a specific type of violence against women or children and used puffy paints to design a shirt expressing their feelings against that type of violence. / photo by Jaime Ortega

by Enrique Gutiérrez
Staff Writer

As T-shirts hung out in the University of La Verne’s Quad, the Iota Delta Sorority ran its annual Clothesline project as a way of fighting violence.

“It’s something that we do every year in the spring semester as part of our philanthropy,” said Iota Delta President Araceli Esparza, senior.

The purpose of the event is to promote violence awareness among the community.

“It’s a way of airing out society’s dirty laundry by using pictures to fight against violence against women and children specifically.

“We just kind of want to let people know that this is happening and it is a big issue of our society,” said Esparza.

“A lot of times it is hidden so we want to bring out that insecurity that people have to talk about it, or to show their feelings about it, or to fight back against it in a peaceable way.”

Michael Houdyshell, coordinator of campus activities and commuter programs said, “I think this kind of event makes people understand this is a problem because a lot of violence against women goes unreported.”

Iota Delta members bought different colored shirts so anyone who wanted to participate had the freedom to create a design representing his or her point of view on violence.

“Each color represents a different kind of violence against a woman or a child,” said Esparza.

For instance, red shirts stood for survivors of rape or sexual assault. Green and blue shirts represented children who were subject to incest or sexual abuse. White shirts represented victims of violence.

“We encourage people to take a shirt that represents a certain type of violence and ask them to design it with their feelings about that issue.

“It’s our way of bearing witness to survivors of these injustices and using words rather than actions to fight back,” said Esparza.

According to Esparza, this event is a tradition of her sorority.

“It’s something that we’ve done for a while, more than five years,” she said.

This year, approximately 125 shirts were made by those who participated.

“We ended up buying about 140 total and all of them but 12 were used,” said Esparza.

The event continued all of last week. On Monday and Tuesday shirts were made, and Thursday and Friday those shirts were hung out in the Quad.

The event also supported the end of Women’s History Month.

“Since March was Women’s History Month, we wanted to close off the month with a good, strong, solid program,” said Esparza.

Enrique Gutiérrez
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Jaime Ortega
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