April kicks off Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and some great events happened today! Our state coalition (OCADVSA) hosted "Soup and Salad with a Survivor", and our very own Danee was the featured speaker! Her topic was "What survivors need from service providers." Danee spoke to a packed house--I mean, everyone who is involved in sexual assault work was there, with barely room to pass each other--and had about 40 minutes to address the group.

Danee was confident and funny ("Can you all hear me back there? I have four daughters, so I can definitely produce the volume!"). She told a brief synopsis of her story, but focused more on how her life was affected by quality of service and care since then. She rebuked service providers for the near-total lack of publicity for service resources, such as the lack of TV commercials, ads, pamphlets, even stickers on bar bathroom mirrors. As a result, she described her years of lonely struggle.

Danee also described failures made by therapists, such as not remembering her story from week to week, forgetting her name, and failing to be warmly connected in any way with her. She emphasized that what a survivor needs in a therapist is someone who will provide support not just through clinical methods and knowledge, but through personal rapport, demonstration of true caring, and emotional investment in the work and the client. She talked about the times she was disconnected from her family, and her cycle through drinking, self-injury, and other destructive behaviors. She emphasized to the audience that services for survivors must be comprehensive--"we are changed after this. Every part of us is changed. We don't know how to go back to the woman we were before rape."--and as a result services must not be stopgap rudimentary project, but should offer survivors a holistic approach that includes medical care, clinical group counseling, and even social connection with other survivors via support groups ("the first time I me another survivor, it changed my life"). She added, "We survivors stick together. When we find each other, we support each other."

Danee also emphasized the importance of training prospective therapists. It's not enough, she said, to just run a counseling program and toss out techniques and trial methods at a victim. The counseling should be in groups, and done by a person "who has read more books on rape than me, and is one step ahead of me in my treatment, and treats me like a wounded woman, not a broken one. I don't need you to act like I need to be fixed!" Sadly, these resources are becoming scarcer, not more abundant.

We then traveled over to the State Capitol for a press conference. Our Attorney General spoke first, and then our Deputy Governor read a proclamation establishing this as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And then Danee was introduced again, and she read her "Letter to Future Survivors" into the record. She concluded by saying, "I will not be defined by rape. I will be defined by what I do in spite of rape!"

She received a thunderous standing ovation!