As most readers probably know, the town of Wasilla, Alaska charged rape victims for their own rape kits on then-mayor Sarah Palin’s watch. But the situation in Wasilla is not unique. Local 2 news in Houston reports that sexual assault victims in Texas are “getting bills, rejection letters and pushy calls from bill collectors” after undergoing examinations.
The Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund is meant to reimburse police departments for up to $700 towards the cost of rape kit examinations – which can cost over $1,000. But the fund and law enforcement often pass the buck back and forth, giving victims the run-around. In fact, Attorney General’s spokesman Jerry Strickland says the legislature requires victims to exhaust all other potential funding sources, such as local police or their own health insurance. Yes, crime victims are burdened with the responsibility of finding a way to pay for criminal investigations.
A rape kit is not a medical procedure; it’s a method of forensic evidence collection. They may be performed in hospitals, but there is no reason a victim’s health insurance company (if she has insurance!) should have to pay for a rape kit exam. Hospitals should not be footing the bill, either. Outrageously, the Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund had $66,572,261 left over in 2008. Millions of dollars are left unspent whilst rape victims fend for themselves.
And it doesn’t end there. In North Carolina, “the vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a rape kit test,” according to the Raleigh News & Observer. Ilse Knecht, of the National Center for Victims of Crime, says she’s recently heard from caseworkers in Illinois, Georgia, and Arkansas reporting that rape victims are charged for their forensic exams. Additionally, undergoing a rape kit exam is no guarantee that it will ever be processed. A Human Rights Watch report reveals that in Los Angeles County, CA, there were at last count 12,669 rape kits sitting in police storage facilities. Some had sat around for over ten years, and in many cases, the statute of limitations had expired.
Being charged for one’s own rape kit amounts to a rape tax, and in too many cases, police department inaction resembles obstruction of justice. These women did the “right” thing after being raped; they reported the crimes and underwent invasive examinations. And they are suffering revictimization due to indifference, at best. Rape victims and potential rape victims are simply not a priority. Meanwhile, rapists remain free to reoffend. What this looks like to me is sex discrimination.
Sarah your internal honing device for sensing the center of sexist bullshit, and the clarity with which you call it out, is unmatched. I’ve spoken about this before but I was raped (many years ago) while living in Houston and got to see first hand the cruel vagaries of the Texas criminal justice system, which wastes victims and the accused equally it seems. At the time I was receiving services from the one and only women’s shelter/support center in the huge city, and at one point the notorious Houston crime lab (just google it, you’ll see) fucked up EVERY SINGLE rape kit it had, ruining the cases of each and every woman in my support group who had reported rape and gotten a kit and allowing their perpetrators to go free while the victims struggled for months or years to put their lives back together again. I wasn’t aware at that time about the self-pay rape kit situation (I did not have insurance and did not go to the hospital in my case) but it honestly doesn’t surprise me. You hit the nail on the head when you point out that the purpose of the kit is forensic, not therapeutic, and there is no other situation I can think of in which a victim is expected to pay for the costs of criminal investigation. For such a “tough on crime” place as America, as Texas, as Houston, it’s amazing how little they seem concerned with actually solving crimes.
The other thing about crime lab fuckups (Houston is also famous for misrepresenting lab evidence to secure false convictions) is that even if they then actually go to court and win it is too frequently the wrong person…though these tactics are supposedly cop and prosecutor happy, they fail at protecting victims from their perpetrators and don’t contribute to public safety. I guess this is obvious but I just resent that even when the prosecutors “win,” it isn’t about the victims.
Meanwhile, how many people are in jail for weed? I’m pretty sure we have the stupidest criminal justice system in the developed world. All it does is perpetuate oppressions and preserve the position of wealthy white men. Awesome. I wish someone would grade states on stuff like this like they do with abortion laws so that we could get an even better idea of where the decent places to live are in this country.
Based on how rape victims are treated, it seems as though being raped is the crime.
This is never going to get better until men jump off the “But I’m not a rapist!” train and start confronting other men about their attitudes toward women.
baraquiel, the thing with weed and all drugs is it is so easy to make arrests. just buy and bust, buy and bust. if you have the drugs you have a conviction, but beyond that studies have shown that vice cops lie on the stand more than any other kind of police officer. rape is much harder to prove — seems like a lot of law enforcement just goes for the low hanging fruit.
@baraqiel: GREAT IDEA. I’m looking forward to a (mostly) free summer, a research project would be the perfect complement to the extremely boring class I’ll be taking.
Sarah, I want to echo JD’s sentiment about your awesome coverage of this sexist bullshit. This headline is right on: if victims are expected to pay for the gathering of forensic evidence, then it is pretty damn clear that the legal system is not regarding the crime of which they are victims as a crime at all. I wonder how many more states or municipalities will try to institute measures like this in the name of frugality in “these tough economic times.” It turns my stomach.
Does anyone know if parents are expected to pay for medical for children who have been abused or raped? I imagine the “what about the children!?” ethos in our society would prevent that particular atrocity, but I’m beginning to think I overestimate the goodness of the average person.
Excuse me, medical examinations.
No, I’m sure that they do go for the low-hanging fruit, but there’s no real reason that rape should be as hard to prove as it is. When someone says that they were stolen from or shot or what have you, the trial isn’t about whether or not a crime was committed, it’s about who’s guilty. But in rape trials, they debate the actual fact of the crime, which is completely absurd. I think that in many rape cases they know exactly who the perp is, and if he goes free, it’s because people don’t believe the woman was raped. If we changed that attitude, it’d be super easy to get rape convictions.
Also it’s pretty clear that drug convictions have a strong racial element to them. If a white guy gets caught with weed, he gets off with a warning, almost all the time.
“it seems as though being raped is the crime.”
Yep. Pretty heinous. And the “tough financial times” excuse does not cut it. In fact, it only reinforces my belief that this is about sex discrimination. In tough economic times, departments must make choices. And the choice to prioritize other crimes (including non-violent offenses) over rape is a revealing one.
Well rape is sort of unique in that the underlying act (sexual touching) is not a crime unless it is done without consent (obviously) so proving it is more like proving fraud or something where a crime takes place in the context of what could conceivably be lawful activity. Except that for fraud there are usually accomplices, paper trails, and witnesses so it is much easier in that regard.
You are right that for the majority of rapes (committed by assailants known to the victim) there is no question of identity and the trial (if it happens) does come down to consent, which generally makes for an ugly and traumatizing trial. But with stranger rapes, DNA and ID evidence definitely comes into play, which is fucked up because juries are more likely to convict on stranger rapes (not so easy to make consent argument) but the convictions are less likely to be correct.
While I agree that there is no reason that rape is not more frequently prosecuted and convictions won, I do think that lack of consent is genuinely difficult to prove; in the absence of evidence of physical force, eyewitnesses, videos, etc. it usually comes down to the testimony of the victim and the accused, which gets really, really really subjective.
I cannot begin to express how angry this makes me. I saw commenters on one of the articles discussing this saying, “we might as well make the families of murder victims pay for the investigations into their relative’s killings.” A crime is a crime, and the victims should never be responsible for payment of something like this. And it just perpetuates the attitude that the victims must have done something to deserve it, because we all know the state would otherwise happily pay for the true innocent victims.
Well, two things. One is that many crimes are only crimes when they happen without consent. If I consent to give you my car, that’s not a crime. If I don’t consent to give you my car and you take it anyway, that’s grand theft auto. But in cases like that, when the defendant has been found with the car, what he tries to prove is that he is not the one who took it away from the owner, not that the owner consented to give it to him. Lack of consent in terms of rape is only sometimes difficult to prove, and yet it’s questioned in almost every case. Furthermore, I think this is one time when “innocent until proven guilty” goes too far. I think it hurts society more to assume that most women are lying about having been raped than to make incorrect convictions in the 2% of cases or whatever it is in which the woman actually is lying. The difficulty that women have convincing people that they did not consent reinforces all sorts of patriarchal norms (obviously) and the criminal justice system is helping that continue.
“Rape tax,” that’s exactly right. Good god what the hell. That’s a perfect summation of what it is.
As for consent–why is it that women need to prove that they did not consent? Why not have the rapist prove that she did? Because (unlike when someone has your car) the female body is under a constant state of assumed consent. It’s why men grad my ass at bars (or used to, when I went to bars). Because they assume (rightly) that my body is theirs to do as they please, and if I have a problem with it the onus is on ME to prove that my body is not public property. I have to prove that I didn’t want a stranger to touch my ass, because unless I can prove it without a doubt, it is assumed that I wanted it/asked for it/deserved it. Because the world is a hellish place.
Well, in any criminal trial the state has the burden to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So the burden is on the state (not the victim, though it feels that way) to prove non-consent. It isn’t that the law assumes the victim is lying (though police, jurors, and others may), it just leaves questions of credibility up to the jury. As you all know there have been major reforms to the evidentiary laws surrounding rape so that it actually is treated differently (more preferentially to the victim) than any other crime. And in almost every criminal case the jury tends to credit the testimony of victims over the testimony of defendants (for better or worse). The reason consent tends to be contested is that unless you are saying “you got the wrong guy, somebody other than me raped her,” consent is pretty much the only defense available to defendants. If you stipulate there was sexual touching, the only question left is if there was consent. I have defended a couple of juvies on auto theft cases perpetrated against people they knew and often we do end up fighting about this stuff too (was it a gift? did he lend it to you?) but most of the time cars are stolen from strangers (this would be analogous to stranger rape I suppose, easier to prove rape happened), there is often a co-conspirator who the cops get to testify, or the car was hotrodded and they didn’t have a key, etc. It does happen that theft cases hinge on consent but it is much more infrequent than in the case of rape (I think).
I don’t have enough evidence but I would guess that trials lost on the consent issue do not comprise the majority of rape cases that do not result in conviction. Many many more I suspect are unreported, fucked up by police or crime labs, or neglected by prosecutors. I do actually believe rape is incredibly difficult to prosecute, more so than other crimes, for evidentiary reasons. I am very open to further legal reforms people have in mind because I often feel stuck about this issue and so tend to advocate around issues like rape kit testing, etc. instead.
This is why women don’t report their rapes. Because reporting a rape is motherfucking *hard*. I don’t just mean getting your shit together to tell someone in time to gather evidence, or even realising one was raped, or dealing with the denial/emotions you’d be feeling if it was someone close to you, or someone you’d consented to before or whatever, I mean reporting a rape means dealing with bureaucracy. Hospitals. Police. Insurance companies. People I avoid talking to when I am in the best possible, most unstressed, confident frame of mind.
I can really see how some women, when raped, even in a case where everyone would believe them- like by a stranger who broke into their car or something- would just deal on their own and put the rape-kit money towards therapy rather than stretch out the event by chasing Blue Cross Blue Shield for any kind of reimbursement.
Skip, my legal advocate straight up told me not to bother reporting if I didn’t want to. With no evidence the case would have gone no where and I would have gone through a ton of grief. I have absolutely no regret about not reporting. I made sure my perpetrator experienced the consequences of his action in other ways.
JD, can you elaborate on how evidentiary laws treat rape victims preferentially, in comparison to victims of other crimes?
SIXTY SIX AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS.
I’m sorry, my brain is still reverberating from that. What the hell are they using the money for, then? What a waste of money, lives, time.
There is no reason not to pay for and process these kits.
Someone with more economic prowess than I should calculate the estimated (because obviously they’re not all reported) number of women who are sexually assaulted every year and come up with some way to put a monetary figure, call it “production loss”, for the emotional toll of an assault PLUS the expense of a rape kit PLUS the knowledge that her attacker is free because no one bothered to process the kit she payed for. Then maybe someone will pay attention.
Spark yes, I just have to work for a few hours and will post later in the evening.
Another reason I’m ashamed to call Texas my home state-although plenty of other states do this as well.
I’m not sure where all the blame should go, but I’d love to ask an insurance adjuster why the hell they would deny someone’s claim for a rape kit. But it shouldn’t even come to that.
The thought of some collection agent calling and saying “So when are you going to pay us for getting raped, huh? If you can’t afford to get raped, then why did you go out in such a tight dress?” It all makes me wanna puke. Even if they aren’t saying it, they’re basically saying it.
[...] I just found out that contrary to the story that made the rounds earlier (SarahMC’s post is here), Texas has not been charging victims for the cost of their rape [...]