 On this particular morning, I woke up and I decided to throw a load of laundry in. There was a man in the laundry room who I recognized as somebody who lives in the building. In an instant, he turned the light off, closed the door. He had me wedged right up against the washing machine and there was just no way for me to escape. Eric Fisher came to take my statement. And just right from the beginning, I just felt very much at ease with him. I said, I'm going to be here for you. And I'm going to get you through this and we're going to get through this together. When I was at White Plains Hospital, I heard the officer saying, you know, we need a sane nurse. Is there a sane nurse? And at the time, I didn't know what one was. And I was afraid maybe they didn't believe me and they thought I was crazy. I arrived within the hour and there was Regina in this exam room sitting on a stretcher. She was beaten quite severely, bruised quite badly, but was able to talk to me and tell me what happened. Karen just had a really kind, warm, endearing way about her. And she right away said, you know, I'm so sorry this happened. This is not your fault. The forensic nurse is your link between the health care system and the criminal justice system. It is my job to provide the best care for the patient and in doing so, ultimately every other member of the team is going to benefit. The same knows what I need and what the DA's office needs for a successful prosecution and what we're looking for to solidify our case against the defendant. Right from the beginning, I had a whole team of people pulling for me and telling me that they were going to take care of this. The outcome was guilty on all counts, music to my ears. When I started the model here in Minneapolis in 77, the norm across the country was to not call an advocate automatically. It was really a dark time for victims. There was no predictability about how a victim would be treated, how the medical exam would proceed. That's where the outrage started with victim advocates and medical professionals that we can do better than this. Community-based organizations, rape crisis centers were used to working with law enforcement. So we had to build a working relationship of trust and accountability and clarifying each other's roles and expectations. The first three same programs were really groundbreaking because they were clearly thinking outside the box in terms of what's the most victim-centered way to take care of victims of sexual assault. I think we all learned from those programs and patterned ourselves after the expertise and best practices that they set up. Before sane nurses came into being, we weren't getting the evidence that we needed in order to successfully prosecute cases. Rape kit collection was looked at as a medical procedure, but it really is evidence collection. Sexual assault nurse examiners can examine the patient, make judgments about what the body tells them as a crime scene, and then come to court and help the jury to understand the significance of the medical evidence. The sane SART programs have made so much progress because we have a good model. The SART model, we know it works, but I think we have a lot to do. Drug-facilitated sexual assault is a very tough case for the entire team. SART members are dealing with a victim who may not have any recollection of a sexual assault occurring or may just have fragmented memory. I know now that he had put something in my drink and he had decided that he was going to render me unconscious and rape me. It's challenging to law enforcement because they have to recognize the effects that these drugs have and how they mimic alcohol intoxication. They need to collect evidence as quickly as possible so that the laboratory has a chance to actually determine if a drug was present. Staying on top of the current technology is critical for the SART. Well, I've been a victim advocate for 24 years. DNA has really, really changed my work. I really, really have struggled with meeting people six, seven years after the crime, whose perpetrators were not found, where they had multiple questions that were not answered. I was 15 years old. I didn't receive any type of counseling, any advocate. I had never really dealt with it. And now, years later, we're able to say, we do know who this is now, and we're going to prosecute this case. When we get our cold hits out of the data bank, granted, many times a number of years have passed since the assault occurred. As more states expand the qualifying offenses to take DNA standards from convicted offenders, the chances of that profile becoming a cold hit just get better and better and better. Oh, I felt very much vindicated. Something that was dead within me had been released. From a prosecutor's standpoint, challenges involving sexual assault response teams, I would definitely say reaching out to more victims is key. We have victims that are elderly. We have people with disabilities. There is a huge underserved rural population that does not have access to those resources. We have children that, in some communities, the nurses haven't even been trained on how to do an exam on a child. Trafficking is an emerging issue. Most of the clients that we've served, they've experienced multiple forms of victimization, such as physical violence, sexual violence, psychological abuse. The majority of victims are from countries where they speak little or no English, so we need to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services. We can never rest. We've got to continue to move forward. We've got to continue to build and hone our response. It's been a lot of hard work to get where we are today, and we need to recognize that. I mean, I can't even imagine what we'd be doing 10, 20, 30 years from now. When sarts work well, the victim feels like she has control again in her life. She feels cared for. She feels compassion. What they do is invaluable, and it can't be done any other way. My hope is that we would have sexual assault resources available to any victim of sexual assault in a victim-centered way 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I mean, we can't stop now. This is just the beginning.