During presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren‘s Seattle visit on Sunday, Leah Griffin had a request for the candidate:
Volunteered 11 hours for #Warren2020 to be the last person in the #selfieline to ask @SenWarren to cosponsor the Survivors’ Access to Supportive Care Act. pic.twitter.com/QUlz2g2pRK
— Leah Griffin (@leahegriffin) August 26, 2019
As Griffin explained in a subsequent tweet, the “Survivors’ Access to Supportive Care Act will increase access to Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners so that fewer rape victims will be turned away from hospitals because they do not administer rape kits.”
Griffin has been fighting for this, and more, since becoming a rape survivor. She talked about her advocacy work earlier ths month at the August meeting of the 34th District Democrats.
She told the group how difficult it was dealing with the system just five years ago; she was turned away from a hospital that said “we don’t do rape kits,” and she could barely get police attention to report the crime, then could not get fair treatment from prosecutors “who did nothing but victim-blame.” She continued to fight. At one point she told her story to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who was incredulous that “rape kits” aren’t available at every hospital in the country. But just having the rape kit isn’t enough – a nurse trained to properly use it is needed. Griffin found that some states had no one available for hundreds of miles to collect evidence. She said that so many barriers to prosecution exist, less than 1 percent of rapists in the U.S. spend time in jail.
In the state Legislature in 2015, HB 1068 created a task force and mandated testing of rape kits. Now, “they’re automatically being sent to the state crime lab.” A tracking system also has been created.
HB 1109 passed two years ago “mandates trauma-informed interviewing for law-enforcement officers.”
HB 1166 passed this past year – 11,000 untested rape kits sitting in storage in our state will get tested. So far, Griffin said, they’ve identified at least a dozen serial offenders.
Also passed, she told the group: A bill that defines third-degree rape as when a victim “clearly demontrates with words and actions” that there was no consent has been amended to strike that language, which had made prosecution problematic in, for example, rapes facilitated by drug/alcohol.
What she and other advocates are pushing for next:
-The bill she spoke to Sen. Warren about, increased access to sexual-assault nurse examiners. This is a federal bill that will ensue they’re accessible all over the country. It costs $200 to train a nurse; the bill would fund $11 million worth of training.
-In our state, training for prosecutors and judges, so they aren’t “driving survivors away from the prosecutorial process.”
In Q&A, Griffin was asked what’s being done for students. She said an attempt failed last year to pass mandatory sex education that includes consent education, but they will try again next session.
She took a wide variety of other questions, including one about victims’ privacy; she said the tracking system was set up to protect that but “a lot of concerns remain” at many steps in the process.
WHAT’S NEXT: The federal bill remains stuck in committee. The list of co-sponsors who’ve already signed on includes four other senators who are running for president. Here’s how to contact senators; here’s the list of who’s on the committee that’s currently holding the bill.
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