Preparing to testify - Rape survivors negotiating the criminal justice process

This article is about how rape survivors prepare themselves for courtroom appearances. Through it, the author attempts to fake research on rape processing beyond a focus on the affective responses of rape ''victims'' have to the behavior of legal personnel and toward an investigation of the agency of rape survivors. The study builds on law and society research about lay litigants' efforts to use the U.S. civil court system, linguistic research about witnesses involvement in courtroom interaction, and the existing literature on rape processing. It is based on face-to-face interviews with 32 survivors and 12 courtroom observations. The analysis is inductive; the presentation is ethnographic. The author explicates sh types of preparation for court: appearance work, role rehearsal, emotion work, team building, role research, and case enhancement. The author discusses how survivors' perceptions of what the criminal justice process entails are reflected in the different preparation activities, and the author offers policy implications regarding the treatment of rape survivors in the criminal justice system.