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A program called SANE teaches Illinois nurses how to perform rape kits, and how to testify if they're called as a witness in a rape case. But very few of the state's nurses have gone through the program, because it takes so much time and hospital funds. And this lack of trained professionals is yet another hurdle victims have to clear if they want their rapists to go to jail. More »
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How bad is the problem of rape kits going untested? We don't even know how many are lying around on police department shelves. Several groups in New York have teamed up to put an end to the rape kit backlog, and their first step is to finally get an idea of what they're dealing with. More »
]]> http://jezebel.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5841945&view=rss&microfeed=true Thanks to to activists, private donors, and public grants, the LAPD has tested all 6,132 unexamined rape kits in its storage freezers. So far, new identifications number in "the dozens"; some of the 1,000 matches were already convicted. More »
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Another day, another story about thousands of rape kits lying untested, this time throughout Texas. After years of decrying these lapses, will anything be done to ensure justice? One major activist is actually optimistic that this year will bring change. More »
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Last night, Law & Order: SVU ran a Very Special Episode. It took on the subject of rape kit backlogs and starred Jennifer Love Hewitt. And let's just say, in true after-school-special fashion, it drove its point home. More »
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As a teenager, Helena Lazaro was raped; it was over a decade before the authorities properly investigated her case. And the numbers suggest that Lazaro is far from the only one ill-served by the system. More »
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Is it worth a $1,500 investment to keep a rapist from attacking again? Judging from the number of rape kits that are backlogged due to lack of funds, apparently, it's too high a price to pay for women's safety. More »
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Police have released a redesigned rape kit for the first time in 20 years. It includes an instructional video narrated by Mariska Hargitay, who first became involved in supporting victims after she received letters from sex abuse survivors. [NYDailyNews] More »
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• What do you do when you find a skunk stuck in a jar of peanut butter? Call the Skunk Whisperer, obviously! Here is a video of him rescuing the hapless animal from his nutty prison. •  More »
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• The president of Mali has announced that he is not going to sign the new family law, which would give greater rights to women, including the right to disobey their husbands and raise the age of marriage to 18. More »
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The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department — already facing an ugly and much-publicized backlog on testing rape kits — has announced the cessation of testing due to funding shortfalls. There's no word when, or if, testing will resume. [UPI] More »
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The State of Texas is currently demanding that rape victims pay for their own rape kits—and if they don't, they face ruined credit and debt collectors. An average rape kit can cost up to $1800. More »
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In the year since Human Rights Watch's Sarah Tofte revealed that the LAPD had 7,000 of America's estimated 400,000 untested rape kits, Nicholas Kristof and a PBS report show it's not much better. More »
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Withdrawal creeps up on you slowly, like, say a huntress in a helicopter when you're a slightly deaf wolf, and then all of a sudden, BAM!, something hits you square between the eyes and you howl in pain. That was what this Palin-less week was like for us. No more Wardrobe-gate! No more race-baiting! No more refusing to answer questions and then blaming the media for asking them! But then we caught Katie Couric's appearance on Letterman last night and she talked about all the questions she'd asked Palin, and we got to thinking... hey, wait a minute: We still have some! And naturally, they're after the jump. More »
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Even after several articles published over the summer chastised the Los Angeles Police Department for its backlog of 7,000 unprocessed rape kits, the LAPD has allowed the prosecution deadline to lapse for 200 of those kits, the Los Angeles Times reports. Police Chief William Bratton tells the Times that his department needs more staff and at least $7 million to sort through the remaining backlog. "What happened here is there are not enough people in the crime lab to do the work," Bratton says. "We got the City Council to authorize 16 additional people, but they did not fund it." More »
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In case you missed it, during last night's debate, Sarah Palin mentioned that Joe Biden had talked about drilling as "raping our intercontinental shelf." While I thought it was just poorly timed, given all the flak she's taken about forcing rape victims and their insurance companies to pay for forensic rape examinations, Ben Smith at Politico and Michael Crowley at The New Republic point out that it was actually a subtle attempt to associate Joe Biden in voters' minds with the word "rape." Ew. Also, why is it that of all the questions Gwen Ifill asked last night, the rape kit controversy wasn't one of them? [Politico, The New Republic] More »
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On Monday, the news that the Obama campaign was supposedly actively recruiting a rape victim to appear in a campaign spot left me feeling vaguely disturbed, and I said so. Other women, like Ann at Feministing, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon and Lindsay Beyerstein of Firedoglake (as well as some of you) disagreed. And, that's fine. But I think it deserves to be a conversation. As the victim of sexual assaults, I too would like to be able to stand up and say what was done to me without pitying looks or shocked looks or discomfort. It's why I am willing to talk about mine. But there's a pretty big gap, to me, between trying to make saying "I was sexually assaulted" as normative an experience for me, the speaker, as for the listener, and being asked to use it to say, "Please go elect Barack Obama." More »
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Sarah Palin hasn't had a good week. From her disastrous interview with Katie Couric to speculation that John McCain wasn't going to show up tonight to spare her from showing up next week, the first part of it couldn't really have been worse. But, since everyone loves a good pile-on, everyone's piling on today! From calls from the National Review for her to drop out of the race (!) to the New York Times saying that she owes voters an explanation on the rape kits issue to news that she accepted $25,000 in gifts from lobbyists as governor to stories about anti-Semitic leanings by her pastor, it's just not turning into a good end of the week for Palin either. More »
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Spawned by a bunch of Republiblog chatter last week "debunking" the "theory" that Wasilla forced victims to pay for rape kits, the National Review's Jim Garaghty takes up his white armor and rushes to Sarah Palin's defense despite — as Feministing's Samhita points out — the basic facts are, well, facts. I.e., true! But who needs facts? I know I do. More »
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• Noted anti-fur activist has some advice for noted huntress Sarah Palin: "She can suck it." Yet another woman with a legitimate policy disagreement with Sarah Palin. [Huffington Post]
• By the way, Todd Palin's about to break his subpoena cherry, as he's expected to be subpoenaed to testify about his role in TrooperGate. God, if only the Congress could subpoena people to testify about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration! Wait, that's right, they could, but then they wouldn't get their bellies scratched. [Wall Street Journal]
• Once upon a time, in a primary far, far away, John McCain said that former Governor Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani (pop: 8,000,000, attacked by terrorists in 2001) didn't have enough national security experience to be President. [Huffington Post] More »
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  Although irresponsible blogger types have been talking about it all week, the mainstream media just up and noticed that when Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, hers was the only town in Alaska that charged rape victims for their forensic examinations. Palin's spokespeople are now claiming that she had no knowledge of what her police chief was doing and would never condone such a thing. Which either means she's lying now, or she didn't notice then that the legislative body of her state was passing legislation with a fiscal impact on her town. That's some damn fine executive experience there. [Associated Press] More »
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  Sarah Tofte is a researcher with Human Rights Watch, and organization more known for its international policy and anti-death penalty work than its work on women's issues — in fact, its website on women's issues in the U.S. is sparse to be sure. But when we saw Tofte's byline on an Op Ed in the L.A. Times last month about the problem with backlogged rape kits in L.A., we were too busy paying attention to what she'd written to think too much about that. More »
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  If you ever wanted a step-by-step description of how a rape exam is conducted in California (your state may vary — mine does), Sarah Tofte's OpEd in the LA Times is a good place to start. It's also a good place to start wondering why some women even bother — as Tofte points out, at least 400,000 collected rape kits in this country have yet to be examined by crime lab staff. In LA County, there is at least a 7,000 kit backlog, yet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa rejected a budgetary request by the LAPD to hire more crime lab staff. Rape exams are vitally important to rape prosecutions and convictions, yet they are also excruciatingly painful and unapologetically, demoralizingly clinical after one has been assaulted. Yet 400,000 women chose to go through that process assuming they were helping to build a case against the men who had brutalized them. Silly them. [LA Times] More »
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  Officials at a Texas high school have their panties in a twist about nude pictures of women in the background of a German textbook. They will either ban the book or put a sticker over the naughty bits. • More banning! This time across the globe in India, some Hindu groups want to ban the Mike Meyers/ Jessica Alba film The Love Guru. • Starting next year, rape victims will be allowed to undergo anonymous ER forensic rape examinations if they do not want to go to police. According to Breitbart, "The new federal requirement that states pay for 'Jane Doe rape kits' is aimed at removing one of the biggest obstacles to prosecuting rape cases: Some women are so traumatized they don't come forward until it is too late to collect hair, semen or other samples." • Is Barbie getting eco-friendly with her new accessory line made from repurposed fabric? Not really. • Nina Simone's daughter, Singer...is a singer! She's releasing an album of Nina covers called Simone on Simone. More »
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  Personally, I think there's an upside to the fact that rape victims are billed for their rape kits. What better to take your mind off what stands to be your life's most damaging trauma than a Kafkaesque little fuck-you letter from our for-profit health care system? [US News] More »
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