A few months ago a friend of mine sent me a story about the plethora of rape kits that sit untested in California (thanks AG!), now that story has made it into the NYT. Kinda like the plethora of untested kits, I sat on this story waiting to blog about it. I don't know what the hold up was, but I suspect that other stories for whatever reason took precedence in my mind. Maybe thinking to myself that this news wasn't likely to change at any moment, and that it could be blogged about at any time. But on the other hand, as this story points out, maybe I just wasn't taking it seriously enough and had stored is as just one of many injustices against women that happen in our society.
This is a problem of huge proportions! Women are being raped on a regular basis, are going through the grueling process of having to do a rape kit (which can take many hours and is incredibly invasive), and then the rape kit isn't even tested or if it is, it is tested a year to a couple years later. In the case of one woman, the police suspected that her rapist was a repeat offender, thus asked for a rush on the kit testing. They were told it would be a delay of about a year. When they personally drove it to the state lab 350 miles away, they still had to wait over 4 weeks to get a test result that should take less then a week to do. And this is in the case of someone being incredibly proactive and urgent. Once the kit was tested they found a DNA match. Unfortunately, while they were waiting for the results the DNA matched man had sexually assaulted two other women. This could have been avoided had the test been run in a timely manner.
All and all, this points to the fact that rape is often not taken seriously enough. It is a combination of taboo subjects in our puritanical culture, we are talking about sex and issues of power, domination, and crime in sex. If people are incapable of taking about sex with their own sexual partners, think about how hard it is for the raped women who are asked to talk about sex while having a rape kit done and then in front of a jury. For these brave women to step up and go through this process, the least we can do is take them seriously and do everything within our power to ensure that their assailant is brought to justice. We may not want to think about this horrible crime, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore it.
NYT Article
Human Rights Watch Report
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1 comment:
two parts of the NYT articles were very disturbing:
"Some Americans used to argue that it was impossible to rape an unwilling woman. Few people say that today, or say publicly that a woman “asked for it” if she wore a short skirt."
F-cking conservative, righteous religious f-ckers!
And, to add to it, the columnist is as f-cked up as the previous righteous f-ckers:
"It’s what we might expect in Afghanistan, not in the United States."
Haven't American soldiers raped many women and children during wars throughout history? I can't believe the columnist can be so narrow-minded after providing us such a great critique on rape cases in the US.
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