Rape Kits: Men Get Screwed Again
Posted by Raven on May 13th, 2008
Copyright © 2008 And Rightly So!
Men, beware.
ELKTON, Md. (AP) - Starting next year across the country, rape victims too afraid or too ashamed to go to police can undergo an emergency-room forensic rape exam, and the evidence gathered will be kept on file in a sealed envelope in case they decide to press charges.
Things you do on a date can come back to bite you years later now. I suggest everyone start videotaping sexual encounters to provide a way to prove a rape didn’t occur. Or something like it anyway.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:15 am
A buddy and I were discussing this. If it were only kept for the 90 days they talk about in the article, that’d be understandable. It’d only really be problematic if it were kept for years. I’ve know quite a few girls evil/manipulative enough to do this and hold it over a guy’s head if these kits were kept that long.
Which led us to the idea of if a woman is caught lieing about being raped, like the lady in the Duke Lacrosse case, or using these kits in such a way, then she’d have to serve the time that the man would have been sentenced to. If the guy had already served time for a crime he didn’t commit, then she’d have that time tacked onto her sentence.
But creating climate of fear, patriarchy, etc.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:19 am
I think you’re making too much of this story because these kits are already in use under most circumstance when a women goes to a hospital and tells the medical staff that she had been sexually assaulted.
The issue is not whether to use such kits. That condom’s sprung a leak and the sperm are on their merry way, so to speak.
As the linked story notes, that these kits are already available and in use. It’s the funding that has been an issue, as some local entities have not been willing to pay for the kits unless a police report was filed immediately. Other local authorities already do pay for these kits regardless. What this law would do is to make the standards uniform and assure state funding for these kit (regardless of whether a police report was filed). Also the article notes that the FBI since 1999 has supported the use of rape kits
What this law will do is to make sure that victims everywhere (instead of a patchwork coverage area of varying criteria) who are too afraid at the time to file police reports will still get samples collected in a timely fashion. And again, these are not home collection kits, women will still have to go to the ER in a timely fashion and tell the hospital staff that they were sexually assaulted. What this law does is to give them time to figure out whether to file a police report.
From an equal protect viewpoint, this law makes sense because it ensures that collection of possible rape evidence will not depend on the “luck of the draw” as to which community the encounter occurred.
In the balance, I suspect that this will catch more rapists than entrap more men with false rape claims (or extortion). I could be wrong, but I think there are far more abused women out there who need time and support to come forward and press charges than there are women who will screw over their sex partner because of the changes in the new law.
This law will only screw-over guys who screwed a woman who 1) happens to live in a community that previously required a police report, 2) who having decided to go to a hospital with the intention to falsely report sexual assault in order to get the use of a rape kit would have chickened out because of the need to file a police report, and 3) who would now use this newly available “grace period” for filing a police report to now go ahead and report sexual assault, get the rape kit collection, and then sit on this case and not file a police report, and 4) who would do all this so that they could extort the guy with a threat of filing a police report of rape.
Frankly, I really don’t think that there are going to be that many woman who meet all these criteria. In other words, the hospital requirement will screen out casual efforts by a woman to screw-over the guy; the woman would have to be seriously pissed or seriouly conniving. And a guy who screwed such a woman - well in the end, that’s just part of the risk of relationships and sex.
The only guys who would get the really raw deal would be those who had consensual sex and then their partner freaked out afterwards or when she woke up the next morning (because she cheated on her boyfriend and was afraid to admit it to him, felt guilty-blame shifting, tardy religious scruples, etc.) and decided to claim rape. (Again, this would only be those cases where the woman would also back off from filing a police report right away). Fortunately, many of these cases get exposed in the investigation because the women isn’t thinking clearly enough to construct a good enough case
Unfortunately, for those unfortunate men who end up getting caught in the net, life isn’t always fair.
That said, I would agree that there needs to be time limit on deciding to press charges. 60-90 days would seem more than reasonable.
If women get to wait years or even months to file charges, then I’d agree that this swings to risk pendulum too much towards opening the door to extortion or revenge. After all, what kind of defense can reasonably be mounted if the guy doesn’t get to make a statement reasonably contemporaneous with the specific sexual encounter, while the woman gave a report at the hospital. Not only would he’d have to try to remember a long-ago event, he’d be open to challenge as to the accuracy of his memory, especially regarding consent. I can’t see how he could get due process.
I’m imagining some poor guy being asked to give a blow-by-blow (or rather, stroke-by-stoke) of his sex encounter on the night of March 15th 2006, especially if he’s been active before and since.
As for videotaping sexual emcounters: any guy who’s so afraid of his partner that he’d insist on videotaping from start to finish isn’t exactly someone any self-respecting woman would want to have sex with, I would think. Not to mention the matter of whether they’d really want to have a sex tape floating around that could later end up on the internet (due to revenge, money, theft, etc.), which at that time could prove very embarrassing at the least…
As usual, the devil is in the details…
May 15th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I wouldn’t have posted this except that a liberal co worker showed the article to me; and stated that women will now **finally** be able to be equal to men…she stated that men who **use** women should be charged with rape and these kits will help them do so.
There are more than a few who will exploit these.