Paul’s School, where her assault was the result of an annual contest of sexual conquest. In this memoir, she tells her story while simultaneously exposing the sordid culture of the venerable New England boarding school, St. Prout testified courageously at the trial of her attacker, came into contact with other survivors, and launched the advocacy campaign #IHaveTheRightTo. Against all odds, she persevered and turned her story into one of redemption and courage that will inspire girls everywhere. In this book, she chronicles her harrowing experience and the miserable aftermath, which included her being ostracized at school, trolled online, and subjected to nightmares and panic attacks. I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope is the memoir of Chessy Prout, a student activist who was sexually assaulted at a prestigious New Hampshire boarding school. There’s a lot that still needs to be done.Review by Nina Dinan, age 15 I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope by Chessy Prout with Jenn Abelson And that’s something I think is supremely messed up in our country, that defendants have more rights than victims do in the process. It would’ve allowed victims close to equal rights to defendants. In New Hampshire they tried to have that legislative shift with the introduction of Marsy’s Law, as a constitutional amendment, and I don’t think it passed. So I think, again, the cultural change has been great, but there needs to be some sort of shift in how survivors are treated through the criminal justice system, through the Title IX processes. I’ve seen the suffering firsthand of people still having to live in their schools, towns, with their abusers walking free. So I don’t ever think about what my case would’ve been like if it had happened in this year, but I can tell you that-with the amount of survivors that I’ve worked with over this year-not much has really changed when it comes to these cases on college campuses or in high schools. Something that I’ve learned over the last four years is that I can never look back and wonder, “What if?” I’ve done that way too often, and it’s led me to lock myself in my room for hours and cry. So I, in my personal life, try to break that stigma in my relationships, friendships, in my family. I think that’s the way it is for a lot of boys and men: No one can really know what another person’s experience is like without being them, so I think having the sympathy to be open to femininity and masculinity not as two separate things, but as things that intertwine, I think it works kind of the same way for men, too. He said, I was so surprised, I was flabbergasted, I had no idea that women felt like this. And he finally asked her, and she said, Look you don’t know how men treat us in public. He talked about how, after college, he traveled around Europe with a female friend of his, and he didn’t understand why she always wanted to be around him, why she never wanted to be alone when they walked around in public. He told us the most interesting story to open this discussion. Representative Annie Kuster was one of the hosts, as well as Mark Takano from California. Jenn Abelson and I went to the Congressional Writers Caucus, they held a meeting to talk about I Have the Right To. I’ll start with this little anecdote from the other day.
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