There Are 400,000 Unprocessed Rape Kits in the U.S. How Can This Be?
There Are 400,000 Unprocessed Rape Kits in the U.S. How Can This Be?
(because women simply do not count)
actress-mariska-hargitay-speaks-to-journalists-as-she.jpg.CROP.promo-mediumlarge.jpg
-actress-mariska-hargitay-speaks-to-journalists-as-she Actress Mariska Hargitay is producing a documentary about America's rape kit backlog.
Not everyone can be as fierce and effective as the fictional detective Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU. But Bensons real-life alter ego, actress Mariska Hargitay, is similarly committed to solving sex crimes. In 2004, inspired by fan letters from rape survivors, she established the Joyful Heart Foundation, an activist group that seeks to quench violence against women. Theyve raised more than $14 million, and now Hargitay will continue her advocacy by producing a documentary, Shelved, about the more than 400,000 rape kits gathering dust throughout the United Statescasualties of underfunded police departments and a culture that still struggles to take sexual assault seriously.
In Washington, the needle seems to be shifting ever so slightly. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden announced a White House proposal to pour $35 million into testing backlogged rape kits and bringing sex offenders to justice. Thats good newsthe unprocessed evidence constitutes a disgraceful failure of law enforcement. Anti-rape activists are quick to point out that, although one-third of women experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, only 3 in 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in jail. And as Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress observes, its a question not only of low reporting rates, but also of the slipperiness of defining and prosecuting sexual violations: Of the rapes that are reported to the police, she writes, only about one out of four leads to an arrestand of those arrests, only about one out of four leads to a conviction. (And that's not because many of the reports are false: As my colleague Amanda Marcotte has noted in the past, false rape accusations are rare.)
. . . .
Theres the easy answer and the hard one. Easy is that rape kits cost a lot to analyzeanywhere between $500 and $1,500 each. But on closer investigation, this excuse, floated by police departments, reveals its big flaw: Interpreting evidence in general is a wildly expensive process; digital forensic analysisof a single computermight set a department back $5,000, while the average cost of processing any case with DNA evidence is $1,397. Despite this, I'm guessing murders and other instances of nonsexual violence dont get shoved down into the collective subconscious quite the way rapes do.
A bleaker and more compelling explanation is that, for a long time, our culture has refused to call sex crimes what they are: crimes. When a sense of blame or responsibility clings to the victim, its easier for cops to set her case aside. And the blurriness (or perception of same) surrounding a lot of rape allegations doesnt inspire much optimism among prosecutors that they can score a convictionso, overworked and underfunded, they dont even try. I wonder, too, whether hypermasculine values in law enforcement have created a mini bro climate. The Village Voice reported two years ago on NYPD officers who urged street cops to manipulate crime statistics by downgrading reports of sexual assault. One man was able to commit six attempted rapes (misdemeanors) before he was apprehended mid-seventh. I like to imagine those cops reporting back to Olivia Benson.
. . .
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/12/unprocessed_rape_kits_cost_concerns_can_t_explain_the_400_000_kit_backlog.html
FBaggins
(26,748 posts)Left off (at least from what I see here) is a rebuttal of far more likely reasons
1 - Cases of rape where the accused rapist claims that the sex was consentual. There's obviously little point in paying $500-$1500 to establish that he had sex with her if neither side contests this
2 - Many rape kits are used in cases that never end up with the victim filing a police report. It's reasonable o discuss societal ills that sometimes cause victims to not file charges, but there's no point in spending money to process evidence that is unrelated to an actual case/investigation.
Minor concerns with the piece
- 400,000 seems like quite a large number, but we aren't given any yardstick to measure it by.
- The forced alternate conclusion (that our culture - specifically criminal prosecutors and investigators - don't consider rape a crime) would be very hard to accept.
niyad
(113,370 posts)Rozlee
(2,529 posts)Anti-choice groups have protested their use. They've claimed that the kits abort the rapist's 'baby.' Rep. Jodie Laudenberg, (TX, natch) claimed that raped kits 'clean a woman up' after a rape, ergo, she reasoned, caused abortions. What is it about my state that creates such conservatives morons? But, right-wing anti-choice groups have militantly joined behind her and continued repeating the fallacy.
niyad
(113,370 posts)Stephen Retired
(190 posts)Sadly.