Miss Missouri getting word out about rape prevention

ST. LOUIS -- In the two months since being crowned Miss Missouri, Amber Etheridge figures she's already logged more than 8,000 miles and finds "it's not all glitz and glamour; it's a lot of driving."

Some of it has been attending traditional fare of pageant winners: parades, local pageants and public appearances. Some of it is prepping for next month's Miss America pageant, including wardrobe planning in Arkansas and voice lessons in Kansas City, with mock interviews and tanning sessions squeezed in.

All of it, frets the beauty with naturally curly red hair and freckles, has cut into the time she'd like to talk about rape, something the 23-year-old graduate of Mehlville High School in suburban St. Louis unfortunately knows plenty about.

While a freshman at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, she was attending a party with friends when an acquaintance of her boyfriend asked to speak to her privately. When she followed him to a dark room, she says, he raped her.

Prosecutors later determined there was insufficient evidence to proceed in her case, partly because she had waited too long to report the matter to police.

The 6-foot Etheridge got the help she needed at the Victim Center in Springfield. She later volunteered there, answering the site's 24-hour hot line and became a spokeswoman and educator for the center throughout southwest Missouri.

Last year as a college senior, she met with every freshman woman on campus, even 19-year-old sister Katie.

"It's not so hard for me. I'm very used to doing it," said Amber Etheridge, who last week met with girls participating in the Girl Scout Council of Greater St. Louis' Project Anti-Violence Education program. "It's hard for me when kids come up to me and say, 'My daddy touches me there."'

"Katie says that other people don't talk about these things in their living room," said her mother, Glenna Etheridge, a nurse. "Until people talk about things that are taboo, they remain taboo."

"She comes across in a way such that I think people are willing to listen to her," the mother adds. "That's not something that, as parents, we talk to our kids about before they go to school."

Amber graduated in May with a bachelor's degree in crime and society, then became a juvenile probation officer for the Greene County court system.

"I cannot wait to go back," she said of her job.

She says she got into pageants for the scholarship money. She later reasoned that the Miss Missouri title would give her a larger microphone to spread her message about rape.

In what spare time she has had this summer, she has begun making arrangements and preparing fliers so that she can fully return to her cause in the fall.

"I know that will be my biggest accomplishment for all of this," she says.

But she has one last pageant to tackle first. And she's hoping to get an even bigger microphone.