As best possible, with each woman or child we provide care for, we try to document what happened to them. With survivors of sexual assault, we respect their healing process and realize that providing a statement may be emotionally taxing and in some cases, we revisit gathering a statement until they are stable. In some instances, when the survivor is quite young, we do not question them regarding the assault but, talk to their family. In many cases, we are able to identify the perpetrator(s).
We document the assaults via labs as well to show the aftermath of assaults in the form of pain, injury, infection and disease.
We do not have the means to collect and store DNA data for the crimes. Often, we do not have access to the survivor immediately after an assault and often times, DNA evidence is long gone.
Here, you will find a collection of some of our survivor statements. They were collected in their native language and translated as best possible. Personal identifying information has been withheld.