Sarah Lavis

I feel like just in that fight or flight.

Just really just go, go, go so I didn't have to think about it.

Definitely affected my relationships with family, friends, partners.

I'm out of that now and I've done a lot of work on myself, a lot of money, a lot of therapy.

Yeah, and that's what we need to take into consideration when we're sentencing people.

that night yeah it just seems like in this country we don't really take sexual assault that seriously yeah i agree we don't understand the full implications of what actually changes in victims lives like there is a lot of people that won't go on to have relationships that won't go on to work that won't go on to be able to study um especially in a stranger situation

I think I'm just passionate for other victims.

Like when I was hearing like...

just so much of people saying how they don't understand about sentencing and why they're getting you know such little sentences compared to the crimes they've done and i kind of thought you know that's one thing like i love true crime podcasts i listen to a lot of them but most of them at the end if they do say the sentence they don't kind of explain or go into it so i feel like everybody's kind of left in that like

It's letting them negotiate their sentencing.

If what they're charged with is what they have to go before the courts for, you shouldn't be able to decide yourself as a perpetrator what you want to plead guilty to.

And it was set up around a system where we didn't have a lot of evidence.

So really, people saying I'm guilty is the best evidence that you had.

But now we're not in that situation anymore.

Like, we've come so far from that.

We don't need to get everybody to say I'm guilty just to get a conviction.

But that's not how it works for sexual assault.

No.

It just doesn't.

You see it over and over again.