?!!!!

[bladespark]

WHAT the freak?

That's just... wrong. Totally and utterly wrong.

What's so wrong? Well, apparently if you get raped, YOU have to pay for evidence collection so that the cops can find the perpetrator. Unlike, say, getting your house robbed, where such evidence collecting is just part of the cop's job. It's because a hospital has to get involved in order to get evidence collected properly. But that's NO excuse for something like that. Ugh. It's hard enough for rape victims without having financial burdens put on them too!

Our society is so very screwed up.

Comments

[graydown.livejournal.com]

It's Missouri. Pronounced "misery." It's the same place where a Katrina refugee's house burned down... and his neighbors looted it. Hellish place for a human being, but Missourians seem to like it there.

Seriously, though, is there any other place that charges the victim for a rape kit? 'Cause that's just sick.

[xpieces-of-usx.livejournal.com]

wow. that's terrible. damn.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

Before I start, I'm just going to say that I'm playing the Devil's Advocate to encourage you to see things from another side.

I'm not sure that's the right analogy, to be quite honest. It's more like if you wanted to hire (or wanted the police to hire) a private investigator to find your robber because you know the police won't be able to. The police are not equipped to do rape kits and thus need to rely on a private entity who expects to be paid for it.

It's one of the failings of a privatised medical system. In this system, doctors have an obligation to save lives (and thus will perform a basic emergency operation regardless of whether the patient can pay) but no obligation to help the police catch a rapist in a non-life-threatening situation. It's a health system for the rich: money gets phenomenal healthcare, no money gets minimum care and huge amounts of debt.

I don't want to defend this since I agree that it's rather hard on the victim but there are dozens of situations where the same is true: where when life hits you hard, it hits you hard multiple times. For example, the family of someone who dies not only has to deal with death, they have to pay for a funeral, services, and often even a patch of land in the cemetary. Perhaps we should make funeral services free. Even in less extreme cases, you spend a small fortune raising children and putting them through college and then they disappear into the masses and you're expected to pay for your own retirement with your own savings. Maybe we should mandate that children over a certain page pay a stipend to their parents. Or what about the hard working American who built a company through years of hard work and endless toil and now that he's a billionaire must pay exorbitant wealth taxes to support the lower rungs of society? American society is rife with such examples.

The flip side of the coin is that Americans are rich; they're able to start up their own businesses and live out the American dream without being taxed to death. Fundamentally, it's a symptom of a society which values individual wealth over a uniform equity distribution across the board.

As far as the rape kit situation goes, a single rape kits costs $1000 or so just for the testing. There are 120,000 incidences of rape in the US per year. Assuming you can get a great 5% return over inflation on investment, you'll need to have $24,000,000,000 principal to provide rape kits for all the victims for all time. The classically American solution would be to start a charity where people give money so other people can have rape kits for free. It's a voluntary equalizing of wealth undertaken by those who really want it. How much would you contribute to such a charity? Would that take away from your giving to charities that provide free mamogramms (actually saves lives), provides schooling to underpriviledge youth, rescues battered women, supports research for cures for various diseases, preserves natural resources, saves endangered species, supports various church missions, builds houses for Katrina victims and so on. How quickly can you get to $24B?

I'm for any law that requires medical centers to do rape kits and have the government pay. I'm also for raising taxes at least 50% across the board to pay for a lot more social services. Sadly, I think most people wouldn't. But then again, no one gives as much voluntarily as they expect back.

[kainhighwind-dr.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's the crappy part of privatised health-care that still amazes me as I've not had experience with it. I'm glad as ever to live in Canada, although we're slowly heading down that road of privatisation too (and suffering for it badly). As much as I dislike paying exorbitant taxes, I do feel secure in our medical system and would much rather pay for it via the government than my credit card (now if only they'd spend my taxes more wisely... damn private jets to luncheons and photo ops!)

[sphix.livejournal.com]

Our entire criminal justice system is in need of reform on both sides.

[silveradept]

I will point out, hopefully helpfully, that there is a law in the state that requires insurance companies and government insurance plans to pay for the cost of those examinations. From the sounds of things, though, there's enough of a proportion of women needing them that don't have insurance of any kind, and must then pay out of their own pockets for the examination. If such a test is the matter of a criminal investigation, then I would expect the doctors to have to write the cost off as a necessary expense, and possibly make it back on their taxes. But if it requires the test to launch the investigation, then the victim is really between a rock and a hard place.

So what is the requirement, then, for filing charges against someone for rape? Does it require a positive result from the examination, or is the sworn statement of the victim sufficient to get things going?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I'm unsure. I suspect that a statment may be enough in some places, as I know of cases where charges were filed quite a long time after an incident.