Can Women Be Trusted With Their Own Evidence?
4.17.2020
Women, and all crime victims, have the right to save their own evidence if they are unable to report the crime. In 2019, legislators, nurses, and advocates created a firestorm, temporarily shutting down the fledgling at-home evidence collection industry for sexual assault survivors.
Journalist Pagan Kennedy wrote “Can Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?” about at-home pregnancy test kits and the opposition women faced when they were first introduced to the market.There are many parallels between the shock and horror of the at-home pregnancy test kits and the backlash experienced with the at-home sexual assault evidence collection kits. That alone is very interesting.
Kennedy’s article explores concerns about disrupting the current pharmaceutical company market for pregnancy testing. Pharmaceutical companies might be seen as aligned with “fast women.” Executives considered hysterical women might kill themselves upon seeing the results.And doctors would no longer have control over this cottage industry.
Here is an excerpt: “Ms. (Margaret) Crane’s story offers a lesson about the social and political forces that can keep even trusted and easy-to-use medical tools out of the hands of patients, and especially the hands of young female patients.”
According to RAINN, we live in a time where 1 out of every 6 American women will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes. At some colleges, as many as 1 out of every 3 women assaulted during the 4 years of undergraduate study. Those sexual assault victims are forced to face a challenging judicial system and a lifetime of nightmarish memories.
Over the centuries, we’ve tried to figure out why people rape others and the numbers don’t diminish. If we start saving our own evidence, there will be more for law enforcement to work with when the crime is reported. If we can catch more perpetrators, we might be able to lower the number of sexual assaults that happen in the US every year.
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