By Ellen Read, New Hampshire State Representative, Rockingham District 10

“Fuck”. 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 cited as the reason the Speaker of the House has made me the first Representative in NH history to be banned from the chamber, gallery, and anteroom where I set up office, 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 “inappropriate” has been pushed…new words for “crazy hysterical woman”.  But, they know me after 10 years in the House, and 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.

And the bill all of this is over, HB1633? Let me ask you a question.

Did you know that if you have been sexually assaulted in New Hampshire, you have a legal right to a state evidence collection kit — what most people call a rape kit?  Do you further know that the same exact law that guarantees that right to a kit, guarantees the right to be informed of those rights?

Did you know that, according to the NH Department of Justice themselves, approximately one thousand New Hampshire residents a year go to a hospital after an assault, and leave without any evidence collected — not because they weren’t eligible, not because they 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. I demanded to be tested for drugging. I was denied. I fought, hard, but was still denied. No one told me I had the right to have evidence collected, because they didn’t know, and they 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.

That experience is why I filed HB 1633 (previously HB 378). The bill does one thing: it requires covered providers — hospitals, law enforcement agencies, others already named in existing statute — to hand a sexual assault survivor a palm card listing the rights they are already entitled to under New Hampshire law. Rights that already exist. Written on a card. Given to the person they belong to.

When I explain this to people, they can’t believe it’s not already law.

The New Hampshire 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 “fuck” in the hall… it had a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

I was not in the hearing room. I watched from the hallway, because I have been told that I have a reputation as someone who does not “play ball” (which is to say sacrifice principles to placate power). In the hallway, alone, I was not quiet. I was watching no fewer than 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 twenty minutes and then called back for a second turn at the end. 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. I learned something I am still struggling to process.

He had been told — and said the other senators were also told, repeatedly before the hearing, by the lobbyists and employees of that lone organization who has been fighting informing victims of their rights for three years — that this bill was an attempt to allow victims to take rape kits home from the hospital.

That is not what this bill does. It has never been what this bill does. It is not mentioned anywhere in the bill’s language. There is no version of a good-faith reading of this legislation that produces that interpretation. And yet that is what the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and apparently other senators on the committee, believed they were hearing testimony about.

I corrected him, and I believe he understands now what the bill actually does.  

I am going to let you draw your own conclusions regarding what it means about the health of our legislative process when legislators are knowingly and systematically misinformed about the content of a bill before a hearing — and then those very misinformers get ten times the airtime in hearings as actual survivors.

Here is what I want you to understand about how this works.

Sexual assault is the most underprosecuted violent crime in New Hampshire. Only five out of every thousand perpetrators will ever see prison. 

The survivors’ bill of rights exists, as it does in 44 states, because the legislature — your legislature — decided that survivors deserved specific protections under the law. Those protections include the right to forensic evidence collection, the right to information about how their evidence will be stored, and the right to be informed of these rights.

That last one. The right to be informed of their rights. It is already in the law. HB 1633 simply requires that someone hand them a card that fulfills the promise of that law.

When a person is arrested in New Hampshire, law enforcement reads them their rights. We do not leave it to the accused to find out on their own. We do not assume they already know. We tell them.

We have not done the same for survivors.

A bill that would fix that has passed the full House of Representatives three times–it dies in the Senate.  What does that say about who influences the Senate.

I am asking those legislators here, directly and publicly, to consider what it means to vote against telling a sexual assault survivor what rights they have. To be on the wrong side of that vote… the wrong side of the 1,000 survivors a year who are not taken seriously. 

The rights are already there. They are already the law. We are just not telling the very people whom the law was written for.

A right kept secret is not a right.  I will continue to say “fuck” 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.