On the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming, there's not a single trained sexual assault nurse examiner.
Northern Arapaho tribal member Millie Friday saw how devastating that lack could be when her own daughter was raped by a close relative. Friday was left with no choice but to take her daughter to a hospital off the reservation.
"We went straight to the emergency room and from the emergency room, the FBI was contacted," Friday says. "So she never even had that choice of what she wanted to do. It was just straight in."
Friday says even standard exam procedures can traumatize victims further, like her daughter being abruptly asked to remove her clothes and put her feet in stirrups.
The cultural insensitivity of non-tribal hospitals leads a lot of women not to report, Friday says. And without official reports, there's no way to bring charges.
[For more of this story, written by Melodie Edwards, go to http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/...with-sexual-assaults]
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