Steubenville Rape Trial & Anderson's Speak

From today's NPR article "Steubenville Rape Trial Begins:"

The case has already been "tried" in the social media, as The New York Times writes. But Wednesday in Steubenville, Ohio, a real court will be the setting as two high school football players in a town that's obsessed with high school football go on trial for the alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl last summer. It's a case...that has caused turmoil in Steubenville — where "accusations, recriminations and threats" have been flying in recent months as critics of the town's football culture charged that players have been allowed to get out of control and supporters of the team have tried to blame the accuser.

Whether or not the accused are guilty, I think it's important to consider what a rape survivor goes through. To get one take, try Laurie Halse Anderson's young adult novel Speak:

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. 

UPDATE:  there's a good review of Speak over at Katie's Book Blog.