Rape Victim Finds Voice to Push for Violence Prevention

When Jean Morrison was 5 years old, she was raped by five 13-year-old neighborhood boys. Back then--in 1967--people didn’t talk about rape, so she kept her anguish inside. Her mother, heeding the advice of books and professionals, thought she would just forget about it.

She never did.

Although it took years to learn not to blame herself, as many rape victims do, Morrison finally found the strength and the words to talk about her experience.

When her voice finally came, she vowed she would help others silenced by shame and fear to find their voices.

“That’s the most important thing survivors can do,” said Morrison, of Canyon Country. “Find a voice to heal.”

Morrison’s desire to help others was so strong that in 1994 she quit her corporate job as a physician’s recruiter to dedicate herself to violence prevention.

Since then, she has organized conferences, worked for rape crisis centers and recently became the volunteer executive director for the San Fernando Valley Youth Violence Prevention Network, which will provide quick access to resources on youth violence. The referral service is still in development.

Morrison, 37, will be honored in March by the Los Angeles County Commission for Women as one of its 10 “Women of the Year.” The honor is given to women who have advanced women’s equality.

Of all her work, Morrison holds dearly the Clothesline Project, which she co-founded locally in 1993. Similar to the AIDS quilt, victims of abuse paint T-shirts with their feelings on surviving sexual, physical or emotional abuse.

Family and friends paint shirts for those who have died violently. The T-shirts are hung shoulder to shoulder on a clothesline and displayed at various locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“We focus on the pain,” Morrison said at a recent “shirting bee” at the Valley Trauma Center in Northridge, where a handful of women recalled experiences of abuse, from childhood incest to date rape.

“We want to bring the pain out--what’s locked up in people’s hearts,” she said. “The displays help survivors that have never had help before. When you see these shirts, they represent real people.”

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Shirts are colored-coded based on the type of abuse suffered. Green or blue T-shirts are for those who were sexually assaulted as children, black is for gang rape, and white is for murder or death from violence. Some survivors of multiple types of abuse write on tie-dye shirts of various colors.

“It’s cathartic. It’s very emotional. It brings it all back,” said a woman who wrote about a date rape on a pink T-shirt. “What’s so sad is that nearly everyone has been touched by this in one way or another.”

The Los Angeles County Clothesline, some 500 T-shirts long, will be displayed March 7 at Occidental College in Eagle Rock and March 29 at College of the Canyons in Valencia. For more information, call (877) LAC-TEES.

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