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Friday, May 13, 2016

The Astonishing Total of 400,000 Unexamined Rape Kits and One Determined Woman's Plan to Do Something About It

Julie Smolyansky discusses campus rape and the outrage of untested rape kits.

Swabs for wiping the lips, face, thighs, vagina and anus. A comb to collect fibers and hair. A pick for scraping debris from under fingernails. A blood sampling device and microscope slides. Baggies for underwear. Documentation forms and labels.

These are just some of the items in the standard sexual assault evidence collection kit, or rape kit, used by American hospitals and police departments. Sexual assault turns the victim’s body into a crime scene and the process of evidence gathering—prodding, swabbing and questioning—can take hours. Victims who subject themselves to this ordeal do so in the hope of justice and the hope that the perpetrator will be stopped from hurting anyone else. But over the last 30 years as many as 400,000 rape kits have piled up, untested, in back rooms and storage lockers across the country. Stacked together they would fill a warehouse the size of a football field and three stories tall.

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7 comments:

  1. It's mind-boggling to think of how many crimes might never have occurred if these DNA samples were in the database.

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  2. But we have time to worry about having a new face on our currency, or, which bathroom to use???????

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  3. Cops got more important things to do, like generating income for the state by writing DUI and speeding tickets.

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  4. Protecting and serving huh?
    Those FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND (say that to yourself again) women don't think so....
    Go ahead Giovanni. Explain that one, pls.....

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  5. SU does not have to worry about such test. They have no sex crimes or crimes in general.

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  6. 3:04 if the did have crime, Matt wouldn't know what to charge them with, he even said so.

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  7. Well, that thread devolved pretty quickly.

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