Bravo, Chessy Prout.

Prout, 17, still looking like the child she was as a 15-year-old St. Paul’s School freshman, stepped forward last Tuesday to say she was the girl raped two years ago by Owen Labrie, a St. Paul’s senior. Labrie, who contends the sex was consensual, was ultimately acquitted of the rape charge but found guilty of three lesser counts of misdemeanor sexual assault, endangering a child and the felony charge of using a computer to entice a minor to have sex.

Victims of rape and sexual assault are not named by the media. Their names may be published if legally obtained, but the press, for a host of reasons, does not do so. It even, as it did in the case of the girl kidnapped and kept as a sex slave in northern New Hampshire, stopped printing her name once it was known that a sex crime occurred.

Defense lawyers typically try to discredit a victim’s testimony by demanding a complete accounting of past sexual activity, something no one normally shares. Identifying rape victims, given the shame still associated with the act, risks victimizing them again. It can’t help but color, at least in the short run, how others view the victim, male or female.

Coming forward, however, does add power and credibility to the accuser’s charges, and it has for Chessy Prout. It also serves to destigmatize survivors of sexual assault and lead other victims of what is a grossly under-reported crime to come forward.

"I want to stand up and own what happened to me. I’m going to make sure that other people – other girls, other boys – know that they can own it, too, and that they don’t have to be ashamed either," Prout told a Today show interviewer.

By going public, Prout made her case her own and not about resisting St. Paul’s School’s demand, in a civil suit against the institution filed by her parents, that the senior Prouts forgo anonymity.

Prout, whose father and older sister are St. Paul’s graduates, returned to the school for her sophomore year but her treatment by students convinced her that the school still wasn’t taking sexual assault seriously. She transferred to another school.

Prout has made her campaign to prevent rape and counsel victims national by affiliating with the advocacy group PAVE, or Promoting Awareness/Victim Empowerment. She is using the forum to tell other assault survivors that they are not alone. We admire her bravery and applaud her effort to change the mentality that takes sexual assault lightly.

While Prout weighed her decision, the victim of another sexual assault case that generated massive public interest faced the same decision. She is the anonymous young woman who, after getting blind drunk at a Stanford University fraternity party, was raped by Brock Turner, a star school athlete caught in the act by the woman’s rescuers.

The exceptionally lenient sentence Turner received, six months in jail, caused widespread publicity and made the case all the more sensational.

The victim in that case filed a 12-page letter with the court that is public, but she did so anonymously – which is her choice and nobody else’s.

Nothing, not the victim’s dress, past sexual history, marital status or inability to consent or refuse, excuses rape. It is always immoral and always a crime. The decision to name the victims of sex crimes belongs to the victim. He or she has already had enough stolen from them.

– Concord Monitor