A Survivor’s body is not just a crime scene.

When a Nurse becomes a Patient Karen Carroll was the head emergency room nurse at Yonkers General Hospital in New York when was raped. As someone with a passion for caring after patients, she was horrified by the experience of her rape kit examination. The doctor’s clear unease performing this essential task made her feel alone and vulnerable. She expected nurses and doctors to have the knowledge and preparation to ease the distress of the survivor of an attack like hers, yet she found herself performing her own rape kit because of the inexperience of the staff.

Treatment shouldn’t be Trauma While Karen is careful not to downplay the trauma of the assault itself, she found her encounters in the hospital almost as distressing and equally scarring. She explains, “You expect violence is horrible and confusing. But the hospital? That’s supposed to be the place were it starts to get better, where things feel under control, and that’s not what happened to me.” Victims should never have to carry the burden of collecting their own evidence, and should not have to fear their rapist roaming free due to mishandled evidence by professionals.

Turning Abuse into Action Believing everything happens for a reason, Karen searched for answers. “I needed to find a purpose,” she explained. “Then I realized that this didn’t happen to me because of something I had done. It happened to me because of something I was going to do.” When Karen learned that her experience in the hospital was not uncommon, she took action. Although most emergency room doctors and nurses have good intentions, they lack the training needed to perform evidence collection correctly, and to talk to victims in a way to make them more comfortable. Karen went back to school at Columbia University to become a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE). Her training gave her a technical understanding of the job, and her experience gave her a compassion that cannot be taught in school.

A Sisterhood of Advocates As a woman of color, Karen was disappointed with the lack of diversity in the SANE community. When she became a SANE in 1997, Karen was the only woman of color with her qualification in Westchester County. 30% of the patients were women of color, and Karen spoke out about the need for more representation in SANE training. By 2008, the number women of color SANEs had grown dramatically. Now Karen calls these nurses her “sisters,” and believes in their power to reach out to women in need with compassion and understanding.

Tackling the Rape Kit Backlog Today Karen works to fix what she believes is one of America’s biggest public safety challenges— the national backlog of untested rape kids. In 2002, with New York Congressman Carolyn Maloney, she called for national funding for forensic nurse programs and DNA testing for backlogged rape kits, collected at the time of sexual assault examination.

“You Are Not Alone.” Now Karen is the associate director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, and shares her story with police, EMTs, and SANEs. She wants survivors to know that abuse is about the perpetrator, not the victim, and fights to ensure that nobody else suffers the traumas she experienced, in the hospital or before.