We’ve heard the entreaties not to confirm Jeff Sessions as America’s Attorney General from civil rights advocates and immigrant rights advocates. But as women prepare to march on Washington in the first major protest against the incoming Trump administration, we heard the plea from someone different: a survivor of sexual assault.

In a compelling and deeply personal testimony, Amita Swadhin – herself a victim of child rape – explained why Session’s record on women, minorities and LGBTQ rights makes him an “incredibly worrisome” pick to head the Department of Justice. She also described her own hardship at the hands of a sexually abusive parent.

“My father raped me at least once a week from age 4 to age 12,” she told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “I endured psychological, physical, and verbal abuse from him for years.” When she finally did find the courage to tell her mother about what was going on and her mother called state authorities, she tells us they failed to take her claims seriously or connect her with victim advocates or support services.

So she was deeply unnerved this fall to hear Session’s downplaying of Donald Trump’s boastful admission of grabbing women by the genitals. After the then-Republican nominee’s comments became public, Sessions told Fox News: “This thing is overblown. Everybody knows that Trump likes women.” Swadhin’s lived experience, as well as the advocacy work she’s gone on to do in the intervening 20-plus years, has given her a visceral understanding of exactly how harmful such dismissive rhetoric can be.

Sessions appears to have altered his stance; in his testimony before the committee this week he allowed that yes, groping women without their consent does constitute sexual assault. But that doesn’t comfort Swadhin: “It directly and negatively impacts me when people minimize sexual assault,” she told me in an interview after the hearing. “To hear Senator Sessions initially say Trump’s comments do not constitute sexual assault and to consider him leading the Department of Justice has been incredibly worrisome. I am unfortunately far from alone in my experience.”

Far from it: 320,000 Americans over age 12 are raped or sexually assaulted each year, according to the US Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey. And given Sessions’ voting record on matters of social justice, there’s little reason to believe he would be a great defender of the populations most at risk.

Though he supported the Violence Against Women Act back in the 1990s, he opposed an expansion in 2013 to include protections for LGBTQ, immigrant and tribal populations. Before that, in 2009, Sessions voted against hate crime legislation because, in his words, “I’m not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don’t see it.”

That kind of blindness is a big problem in the person tasked with administrating justice in America. And as a queer woman of color, a sexual violence survivor and the daughter of immigrants, it’s not hard for Swadhin to articulate why. “National data shows LGBT people ... are disproportionately victimized by rape and sexual assault, intimate partner violence and homicide,” Swadhin noted in her testimony. And one in two transgender people will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Such crimes are already grossly underreported. Under an Attorney General Sessions – and he will, by every prediction, be confirmed – there are even fewer assurances for victims thinking about coming forward with their stories.

“The point I was trying to make in my testimony is that most victims of violent crime, particularly in cases of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence, are violated and abused by people we know and trust,” Swadhin told me. “For us to come forward and report incidents to the state, we have to be able to put our trust in strangers – police officers, social workers, prosecutors – who we’ve never met before and speak out against people we know very very well, who have hurt us. Even with the best attorney general in power, that’s very hard to do.”

As Jamelle Bouie points out, we can’t know what’s in Sessions heart, but we can know his record. We can know, for instance, that as a prosecutor in the 1980s he presided over a voter fraud case against black activists working to register voters who were too old or illiterate to vote without help. We can know, as Pema Levy has documented, that in the 1990s he played a pivotal role keeping black judges off the federal bench. And we can know, given a political reality in which it’s impossible for the Department of Justice to enforce every law on the books, that Sessions’ actions will come to be determined by his values. As Swadhin puts it in our interview: “We know Senator Sessions personal beliefs and voting record are going to be a predictable measure by which we can anticipate his own law enforcement agenda,” she said. “And that agenda is very disturbing.”