“I was raped” shirt: Awareness-raising or divisive?

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Feminist Jennifer Baumgardner – who created the controversial “I had an abortion” shirt several years ago – has just released a new shirt as part of a rape-awareness project.

Abortion and rape are subjects that are secreted away and are also surprisingly common, Ms. Baumgardner said. One in six women is a victim of sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, a nonprofit sexual assault prevention and education group. According to the Department of Justice, 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported.
As she has been interviewing women for a film she is making about sexual assault, Ms. Baumgardner has heard women describing the usual reasons why they frequently don’t report rapes — shame, humiliation, fear that they wouldn’t be believed, or that they themselves had somehow provoked the attack. “By having an object like this� — a simple T-shirt — “that’s so mundane, it sort of forces it into everyday conversation,� Ms. Baumgardner said.

I appreciate the work that Baumgardner is doing here and I think it’s super interesting – though I’m not sure how I feel about it. First of all, the passivity of the sentence itself bothers me. It takes the rapist out of the equation. (Although it seems that Baumgardner was trying to counter that through the design.)
I’m also concerned about the possible division that a shirt like this could create – those who are willing to be public about their assault and those who’d rather not. Are rape survivors who don’t want to wear a shirt like this going to be perceived as somehow not “owning” their experience? (That’s not to say I think anyone would be that weird or judgmental in reality – it’s just a theoretical point…) But I do think that discourse surrounding violence against women is important – and this shirt certainly will be a conversation-starter. What others think?

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