Alison Arngrim is a powerful international speaker and actress who is best known to viewers world-wide for her portrayal of the incredibly nasty "Nellie Oleson" on the much loved, long running hit television series Little House On The Prairie. Alison, a sexual abuse survivor herself, testified before the California Senate regarding the critical importance of closing the incest exception loophole that decriminalized rapes when the perpetrators of those rapes were close family members of the victims. The following is an excerpt from her moving and, ultimately, effective testimony:
"The pressure placed upon those of us who have been sexually victimized by our own families to 'just shut up and take it', is almost too horrifying to describe. So shut up and take it we did. After all, they told us it was 'for our own good'.
So, I apologize that it has taken us quite so long to get up off of the floor and stand up on our hind legs and speak like human beings, but I promise you, we will continue to stand up straight from here on in.
We who have been raped by our own flesh and blood will no longer tolerate being treated as someone’s 'personal problem', 'a private matter', or as the 'acceptable collateral damage' of some misguided therapeutic experiment.
Nor will we be treated as 'second class citizens' in the courtroom.
We are not statistics. We are not 'therapeutic constructs'. We are human beings, we are registered voters and as of April 20, 2004, we have had enough."
