

“Victim-centered means that investigations prioritize the needs of the victim, and trauma-informed means that the process should seek to minimize retraumatization of the victim and take into account the effects of trauma.” “It’s important that any investigation process for sexual assault be victim-centered and trauma-informed,” she wrote. When I emailed the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), their press secretary, Erinn Robinson, concurred with this. My first rule is always that it’s up to the victims to decide where they want to go with this.” When I asked my friend Jennifer Powell-Lunder-a clinical psychologist who teaches at Pace University-how mental health care professionals typically pose questions to alleged victims, she said: “It can be retraumatizing, so you give them all the time they need to get to a point where they’re ready to tell you, if they want to tell you at all. I’ve since learned that Palmer’s approach that day isn’t what’s generally considered best practice when dealing with victims of sexual assault. It didn’t seem right of her to call me up and ask me this without any preparation. I felt like I was going to be sick, and then I started to feel something close to outrage. Weber” that made me feel so infantilized, like I was a student at Exeter again, in trouble for something. It wasn’t Weber I was remembering suddenly, it was the college boy who had raped me in a dorm room at the University of Miami when I was 14 years old, an experience I had only just begun to process some 40 years later. I put a hand on the wall to steady myself. I’ll never forget the look on the face of my French teacher when, feeling anxious and overwhelmed, I got up to leave his class, telling him, “ Je suis mauvaise”-“I am evil.” I had meant to say “ Je suis malade”-“I am sick.” I also didn’t have the same level of academic training as my classmates, many of whom had been in private school since they could talk (and many of whom went on to become leaders in business, tech, academia, the arts). The cool girls at Exeter wore threadbare corduroys, flannel shirts, and clogs so worn down, the heels were just slivers of wood I’d brought nothing so shabbily chic.

#Chessy prout cross examination full#
My father, trying to be helpful, had bought me a suitcase full of preppy classics from L.L.Bean (shirts with Peter Pan collars, knee-high socks), which wound up making me look like an embarrassing wannabe. Nobody in my family had ever gone to boarding school, so I arrived at Exeter unprepared in many ways. No one had told me that when handling snowballs you should wear gloves. I energetically took part in a giant snowball fight in the courtyard outside my dorm, during which I developed a serious case of frostbite on my hands. So I was sent to boarding school for my last three semesters.ĭays after I arrived at Exeter, there was a snowstorm. My mother and stepfather, burned out on running a busy health food restaurant for 10 years, had decided to move to a small town in the White Mountains and open a cheese shop. My family had just moved to New Hampshire from Miami.
#Chessy prout cross examination movie#
It looked like something out of a movie to me, with its pristine redbrick buildings, more like a fancy college than a high school. So why did he confess? And why did Exeter punish him even though I said this never happened? As Nabokov says in the beginning of his novel, “Look at this tangle of thorns.”
