Sue Snyder the wife of Michigan’s Governor seems to be taking the lead in formulating solutions for the issue in her state. She held a Summit last June with a consortium of Michigan colleges and the Executive Summary is linked below. Apologies ahead of time if it has been previously posted.
I found the sections on the neurobiology of trauma and the suggestions by the Michigan State Police helpful. If nothing else it confirms in my mind just how complex this issue really is.
“Actually more prosecution may be the answer. There are 70,000 unprocessed rape kits in this country. Men don’t have to fight back. The system protects them all the way.”
The rapes leading to rape kits aren’t the ones we’re talking about in the higher education context. Acquaintance rapes between college students almost never produce rape kits. You get a rape kit when you go the emergency room shortly after an alleged assault. That just isn’t the pattern that happens on campus.
Plus the rape kit issue has to do with lab time/funding, not with more prosecutions.
We live in rape culture, a culture where 70.000 kits–70,000 women who reported rape–are ignored. This has everything to do with rape in higher education and everything to do with the unwillingness to prosecute. To quote CardinalFang, think about it for ten seconds.
One doesn’t have to know that there are 70,000 unprocessed kits to know that the culture doesn’t care about women being attacked. The evidence is everywhere. I am surprised anyone reports rape given the prevailing misogyny.
Rape kits exist primarily to collect DNA evidence necessary to prove the identity of the assailant. Pretty irrelevant to campus acquaintance rape situations where the identity of the guy is usually known and the only issue is consent.
The reason why most rapes don’t get reported and few reports result in convictions is because a reasonable amount of proof is usually lacking. One thing mattress girl was right about is that no process is going to work well for victims. Because even the most watered down process will still require the kind of proof that victims usually don’t have.
Ounce of prevention…
DNA>>>serial rapists, linked reports. Of course rape kits matter to acquaintance rape (the overwhelming majority of rape is acquaintance rape, remember?)
@mamalion; The kits aren’t ignored so much as the labs are understaffed for the amount of work. In the college rape scenario, the kits are usually irrelevant because all they potentially prove is who had sex. In college rapes the question usually isn’t who had sex but rather whether the sex was consensual. Kits don’t help determine that.
It’s not hard to connect serial attacks in the college setting. Everyone knows everyone else’s name. If more women sought prompt ER treatment after campus rapes, that might help with some proof problems (when there’s bruising, etc.), but colleges are already connecting the dots just fine when there are multiple accusers of the same attacker. That’s the least of their problems.
Of course the public criminal labs are underfunded because society hasn’t made this enough of a priority – and that’s largely because the people reporting rapes in the criminal system are mostly poor, and often sex workers and people of color to boot. It’s a different set of issues on campus.
Kits can show if there was a possibilty of force or violence. Kits potentially can also show if there was penetration. Many guys including college guys say there wasn’t sex and rape kits can show otherwise. Potentially proving who had sex is not irrelevant.
I agree with mamalion. There were hundreds of thousands of kits that were ignored. At least hundreds of thousands of cases where women claimed rape, had rape kits done, and their cases were ignored.
Now some rape kits that have been sitting around for years are being examined. And guess what? We find rapists.
It is insulting to women and also men to say rape kits were not examined because of money. We have lots of money to make bombs. We have lots of money to give 100 people at Reniassance Technologies tax breaks that can run into billions of dollars. Society chooses where it spends its money. Women who were raped…not important enough.
If you immediately processed the entire backlog of rape kits, there would be almost no impact on campus assaults which is what we’re talking about. Most college incidents don’t get reported to police, so there’s no kit in the first place. Most college incidents involve a known accuser who admits to having consensual sex. So most of what the kit would show is not in question The lack of a rape kit is not why campus assaults go unpunished.
Simply not an issue worth talking about in the campus context.
It is an issue. College students do have rape kits done.
Also the way society treats rape affects college students.
I am pretty sure the Violence Against Women Act requires states to provide sexual assault forensic exams (rape kits) free of charge if they wish to remain eligible for anti-crime grant funding.
And rape kit results could show trauma suggesting force which could be relevant in evaluating whether there was consent. I thought completing a rape kit was one thing we all agreed was prudent for a woman to do.
It certainly is prudent to get a rape kit. That’s one of many topics that would be covered in comprehensive education. Right now, rape kits play almost no role in campus sexual assault investigations.
It’s worth talking about if you wonder why college students don’t report their rapes to police.
People on these threads constantly whine that women who have been raped should report their rapes to police, apparently in the mistaken belief that police take rape reports seriously. Many police officers do not take rape seriously.
As of July 1, 2015 it looks like California now has mandatory reporting to law enforcement:
Campuses are required to report that a sexual assault was reported, but they are not required to report the name of the accuser unless s/he consents. If the accuser’s name is not reported, the alleged assaulter’s name can’t be reported either.
http://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/law_enforcement/info-bulletin-dle-2015-01.pdf
@dstark: My understanding is that the kit SART uses can show the vigor of the sex (this can be force or simply energetic sex) but that’s not what goes to the lab, where the backlog is. Those are the fluid samples to look for DNA.
Also, I did not say that proving sex was never relevant, just that it often is uncontested.
@Cardinal Fang: The schools are also required to do a yearly report of their gathered statistics, which should be interesting. I have to say that I’m not sure how effective the victim consent provision will be. In the event of any proceeding the accused will just subpoena the information.
I don’t understand your point here. Advocates of campus accusers having to report their accusations to the police want the police to then investigate the alleged crimes. If the school merely tells to the police that a rape was reported at X College, what are the police going to do? And why would the alleged attacker, whose name was also not reported to the police, be concerned about this police report? What would the subpoena be for in this case?
Who would qualify as a mandatory reporter under this California law? RA’s or other Residence Life Staff? What about coaches?
“Campus security officers,” defined as follows:
quote a campus police department or a campus security department of an institution, (2) any individual or individuals who have responsibility for campus security but who do not constitute a campus police department or a campus security department (for example, an individual who is responsible for monitoring entrance into institutional property), (3) any individual or organization specified in an institution’s statement of campus security policy as an individual or organization to which students and employees should report criminal offenses, and (4) an official of an institution who has significant responsibility for student and
campus activities, including, but not limited to, student housing, student discipline, and campus judicial proceedings.
[/quote]
Not RAs, and not coaches, though an institution might require RAs and coaches to report suspected assaults to someone who was a mandatory reporter.