“F—.” That is the word, uttered in a public hallway, in response to watching sexual assault victims like me once again being ignored by the very institutions meant to protect them. That is the reason the Speaker cites for making me the first Representative in New Hamsphire history to be banned from the chamber, gallery and anteroom where I work, on nonsession days.
And just like with sexual assault victims, the classic misogynistic tactics have been trotted out — every attempt to discredit me as “erratic,” “unhinged,” and “lunatic” has been pushed. Just new words for “crazy hysterical woman.” But after 10 years in the House, they know full well that I will not be intimidated, manipulated or silenced. They know I am not crazy, but principled. And that is the point. Power hates principles because principled people cannot be controlled.
The bill all of this is over, House Bill 1633? First, a question:
Did you know that if you have been sexually assaulted, you have a legal right to a state evidence collection, also known a “rape kit”? Or that the same exact law that guarantees that right to a kit, guarantees the right to be informed of those rights?
Or that, according to the Department of Justice, every year 1,000 assault victims go to a hospital, and leave without any evidence collected — not because they weren’t eligible, or didn’t want it, but because no one told them they could have a kit administered, or in fact had a right to one?
I know, because I was one of them.
After my own assault four years ago, I went to a hospital, demanded to be tested for drugging, and was denied. I fought, hard, but was still denied. No one told me I had the right to a kit. They didn’t know, and therefore didn’t know to tell me. I left that day, having forever lost my chance to get evidence and justice.
The right existed. It was right there in New Hampshire law. But I, even with my experience and loudness, just couldn’t get that right fulfilled.
So I filed HB 1633 (previously HB 378). All it does: requires hospitals to hand the list of those rights to victims who come in. Rights already in law. On a card. Given to the victim.
When I explain this to people, they can’t believe it’s not already law.
The House has now passed this bill with near unanimity, three times. The most recent vote was 340 to 1. The lone dissenter? The former chair of the only organization opposed to the bill.
That night that I said “f—” in the hall … it had a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
I wasn’t in the room. I watched from the hallway, because I have been told that I have a reputation as someone who doesn’t “play ball” (or sacrifice principles to placate power). In the hallway, alone, I wasn’t quiet while watching four sexual assault survivors be given three minutes to testify about the worst thing that ever happened to them, while the opposition — essentially one lone organization — was given 20 minutes, and then called back for a second turn. And the committee members seemed inexplicably confused as to what the bill even did.
The next day, I met with the committee chair to discuss the bill directly — and learned something I am still struggling to process.
He said all the senators were told — repeatedly before the hearing, by lobbyists of that lone organization — that this bill allowed rape kits to be taken home.
It doesn’t. It never has. There’s nothing like that in the language. There is no good-faith reading that produces that interpretation. And yet that is what the Senate Judiciary Committee members apparently believed they were hearing testimony about.
I corrected him. I believe he understands now what the bill actually does.
Draw your own conclusions about the health of our politics when legislators are knowingly and systematically misinformed a bill before the hearing — and then those very misinformers get 10 times the airtime in hearings as actual survivors.
It is simple.
Sexual assault is the most underprosecuted violent crime. Only 0.5% of perpetrators ever see prison.
Yet when arrested, rapists are read their rights. We can’t do the same for survivors?
The survivors’ bill of rights exists, like in 44 states, because your legislature decided that survivors deserved certain protections: the right to forensic evidence collection, confidentiality, denial of individual tests, information and the right to be informed of these rights.
That last one. The right to be informed of their rights. It’s already law. HB 1633 simply fulfills that promise.
I’m asking those legislators, publicly, to consider what it means to vote against notifying victims of their rights, to be on the wrong side of the 1,000 survivors a year who aren’t taken seriously.
The rights are already law. We’re just not telling the victims for whom the law was written.
And a right kept secret, is not a right. I’ll keep saying “f—” until there are no more secrets.
Ellen Read represents Rockingham District 10 in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. She is Founder of the House Progressive Caucus, State Lead for the National Foundation of Women Legislators, and the prime sponsor of HB 1633.