This project explores the complex web of relationships within the world of legal and medical sexual assault interventions and the consequences and benefits of the formal system by which the State interacts with sexual assault victims. The PI will use field research techniques to follow particular sexual assault victims and their cases over a one-year period to understand and document the short- and long-term effects of legal and medical sexual assault protocols. This project is guided by three questions: 1) How do individual actors and the evidence that they produce and document preserve a sexual assault victim's physical violations such that they are within the appropriate institutional structure? 2) What is the role of time in the encounter between victims and institutional agents in the emergency room and adjoining sites? 3) What are the multiple, at times conflicting, narratives of sexual violation and healing in circulation at different stages in the intervention? This project deviates from the approach taken by most studies by starting at the moment at which sexual assault victims enter a facility that provides care rather than a courtroom.
