"I Am Evidence" documentary - speechless

[DoinItForTheKids]

I'm sure we all heard of the unprocessed rape kits in the US - do people recall? I just watched this documentary "I Am Evidence" on Sky Atlantic and boy, my blood is boiling.

Seriously, goosebumps throughout - the bad kind. So many things it's hard to pick out the most shocking but here's a few (I was so agog and outraged whilst watching I didn't stop to note them all down):

• right near the end a cop saying "in truth most of the rapes aren't rapes they're misunderstandings" (or words to that effect)
• 221,000 unprocessed rape kits (and rising) across the US
• utterly appalling conversation rates for victim rape kits found to match to a perpetrator's DNA sample taken through to prosecution - around approx 1% of the matches round in one case according to my rubbish maths that actually made it to that stage
• you had to be a 'righteous individual' for the rape kit and thus an investigation to even be started (the right sort of person, the right type of dress, the best quality account etc)
• if you were a black woman (I say woman because of course the massive majority of the rapes were committed on women) then your chances of having the rape kit processed were even worse, and even more rubbish if you were black and poor
• the proportion of those kits processed and found to be a match that turned out to be a match in other rape cases and thus the person was not only a serial rapist, but had raped whilst their untested kit sat around in one (or possibly more than one) State's evidence area with the seals not even broken on the evidence - they'd simply been put into storage with NO intention to investigate whatsoever. The further women only got raped because of the failure to already place that person in prison for the previous rape
• of course, as per here, several of these cases went to court and yes, of course, despite the DNA evidence, the cases did not result in a guilty verdict. Interestingly, as I write this, the two women whose cases the guy was found guilty were (I think, sorry doing this just from recall) cases where the perpetrator was white and the victims were white. The one that didn't result in a guilty verdict was a black serial rapist who'd raped a black woman...

Oh, and no law exists to say that the various police departments can't destroy evidence before the statute of limitations runs out! The one cases I referred to where the white woman secured a conviction which resulted in a 30 year jail term, she ONLY got it to court because he'd also robbed her which made it be prosecutable in court - if it had been just the rape the case would not even have been able to go to a trial.

I mean, what more evidence do you need bearing in mind this is the developed western world, that women generally count for shit?!

I tell you what, as I get older I get more and more pissed off with all of this shit.

edited by MNHQ at OP's request to remove link

I've seen Maria (can't spell her name) talking about this but not seen the program. I'll watch later but suspect my blood may boil as well.

Thanks for flagging this up.

I dont trust the link.

It’s enraging. Where is the effing point of taking these samples if you aren’t going to process them?

There have been several cases of serial rapists being apprehended after many years of offending, only to find they could’ve been identified years earlier if samples had been processed in a timely manner rather than left to gather dust.

Welcome. Honestly, this sort of stuff should be getting shown in schools - I do feel our young women, typically, are going out into the world unaware of the crappy way women are viewed at the overall general level. Not that this type of thing is news in the UK except I'm thinking of child abuse cases left on the shelf uninvestigated. A girl about 15 (a virgin) who was raped one after the other by 5 men in the back of a taxi. Reported it. Sat on the shelf for three months. No police officer was sacked or prosecuted for this - it's utter utter bollocks. As we can now see bearing in mind we've got yet more CSE rings that have been exposed in recent times.

Injustice like this absolutely enrages me to hitherto unknown levels.

I'm REALLY sorry about the link! Yes, it's pants.

I'll try and find something way way better (wouldn't be difficult).

Folks I don't know what to do about trying to link it or direct you to this programme unless you have Sky incl. Sky Atlantic! I don't know where or how else you can watch it - anyone any ideas let me know. I will ask on Sky forums but that's all I can think of to do.

Lovely MNHQ have removed my useless link [hangs head in shame] - I can only learn that what we do is have to watch it on Netflix I'm afraid - so sorry; totally buggers up this entire thread!

I want to watch this - I will find it enraging but I want to watch it so I can talk about it and get others to watch it. I've decided, in the face of cowardly behaviour and capitulation that we have seen this week, I'm going to be braver with my feminism.

Thanks OP!!

I have not seen the film, bit the way rape kits have been treated here in the US is a huge disgrace. But due to the efforts of Mariska Hargitay things are starting to change. The issue was also addressed in the recerification of the VAWA in 2013. There are various state initiatives as well. I would like to see all states required to at least let women know when their kits have been tested. We know that these tests are revealing more serial rapists, I wonder if any will result in class actions suits vs states or police departments.

What's a "rape kit"?

Is this an American thing?

Is this an American thing?

Yes see the first sentence.

I find as I get older the things that I can't watch any more are getting more and more frequent. I am so angry at the way women are treated literally everywhere we go.

Serfisafleur Yes, its a terrible name, its basically forensic evidence taken from the victim after an attack. So it could be semen, hairs or skin. It transpires that most of the kits are never sent for DNA testing, and thousands have been destroyed without ever being tested.
There's been a movement to change that, and as a result it transpires that a high percentage of rapists are serial rapists.

www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/what-rape-kit-backlog

www.endthebacklog.org/backlog-why-rape-kit-testing-important/test-rape-kits-stop-serial-rapists

Its absolutely disgusting. I haven't seen the documentary but I saw an article about the woman who noticed that all these kits with not being investigated properly and brought it to public attention.

Yes Serf, it's the evidential stuff they take from you when you go to a sexual assault place and they then process the hair, scrape for pubic hair and other DNA on you etc. Not sure what we call it here in the UK.

TERF (love your name!). I guess as we get older we have a build-up of this stuff way over time and you realise how shitty it is.

Just like the failure with child abuse here there should be individuals being prosecuted. Entire police departments should be had up for negligence due to their policies, failure to follow procedure, evidenced discrimination and discriminatory attitudes - it's totally reckless to have DNA and not process it and allow multiple further rapes to take place.

Let's hope if the women can manage it and if it's viable, that some of those turn into lawsuits because there must be something that allows them to sue for being exposed to a rapist who should already have been behind bars years before?

As you can imagine too, the women who thought their case had gone nowhere, had to re-live it completely unexpectedly when they finally decided to process these rape kits, which was incredibly hard for them some of whom hadn't told their families about their assault for 12 years.

I read about this a few years back there was a big scandal where it all came out wasn't there.

At the time a few people said if the police know they are never going to process the evidence etc then why get the women to go through the further trauma of the examination. That is simply utterly peverse.

On this "* right near the end a cop saying "in truth most of the rapes aren't rapes they're misunderstandings" (or words to that effect)" the head of teh met said something recently that chimes with this she basically said they aren't going to botehr with historic sex abuse/ rape or with ones where the victim knows the assailant (she didn't put it as bluntly as that but nearly).

The police here with support from the press and I think govt are working to get things back to where they were with sex offences ie only violent stranger rape counts, preferebly with a dead or "perfect" vicitm. They can't afford to deal with all the reports they are getting now and aren't really interested (unless there's no proper violence that men recognise as violence ie a proper broken nose or arm or something).

The definition of what constitutes a violent crime / assault is still in the police and in the public based on a male view, focussing on the sort of crimes men commonly commit against each other. Plenty of blood and breakages. Sexual violations with no permanent or severe physical injuury are not seen as real assaults, nor are lots of the other things that are more likely to happen to women.

Cressida Dick recently:

"She told the newspaper: 'Speaking as a cop, opposed to a citizen, I'm interested in crime. If it's a long time ago, or it's very trivial, or I'm not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I'm not going to spend a lot of resources on it.

'And what might be a misunderstanding between two people, clumsy behaviour between somebody who fancies somebody else, is not a matter for the police.' "

Like the case upthread, where the woman got to court becasue there was a robbery as well - something that male constructed law and policing do recognise as a "proper" crime.

Cressida (aptly named) Dick... This is in effect an admission of the police's inability to process, investigate and prosecute rape cases - there are just too many of them....

It's this combination of massive numbers of rape cases, a lack of will to investigate, abhorrent attitudes and shoddy procedures which led to the US backlog in the first place (sexual assault every 2 seconds I think the documentary said) and they just couldn't keep up - so they just totally stopped.

In one State rape kits just got sent straight to storage into a bloody abandoned warehouse building and they told victims at the time after they'd had the intimate evidence retrieval procedure that their evidence 'would probably never be processed'!

It's interesting to me that the police are more keen to respond (within their 1 hr target) to a domestic burglary even though only 1 in 10 result in a conviction. When you think that with a house, if we all genuinely took our fingers out, we could in reality make our homes far less easy to get into. But you can't do that as a human being can you - as we know, not dressing 'sexy' doesn't protect you, being very old doesn't protect you - rape happens whatever and every rape should be investigated.

Oh and these US officers had a case where this woman was gang raped. Of course during this horrific event the woman just shut down and didn't fight. The officer concluded 'she must have wanted it' because she'd 'just lain there'. They literally have no concept of what people do during the event to get through it - it's pure instinct. Fight, flight or do nothing, play along. But they were too dumb to even know that or figure out how it might manifest in such a situation. I think they referred to her rape kit as (and I've got the wording wrong but the gist of it is right) 'a sloppy' something or other - inferring on her some kind of inability to give a sample or that the sample had lots of different DNA sources in it and made those samples a mess - like she'd done it on purpose to make their lives more difficult!

Yes Sardine, bollocks isn't it.

Just standard practice in patriarchal societies, with laws made by and for men.

Oh my god, 24 Hours in Police Custody tonight!! "No witnesses" - so the 50 year old man he got to rape her wasn't had up for rape or utilised as a witness. Another violent serial rapist has his 3rd NFA rape accusation that he walks away from - 'no further action'. Jesus.

Oh my god, 24 Hours in Police Custody tonight!!

Wish I hadn't watched it, to be honest.

What's the new coercive control law for if not for this situation? The guy had clearly groomed a highly vulnerable girl with low social skills.

Absolutely appalling. Appalling.