Soraya Chemaly: 10 Crucial Facts About Rape Kits — True Even in Texas
A rape kit is a forensic tool used to collect evidence of sexual assault.
-A rape kit is not an abortion.
-A rape kit does not “clean out” a woman. Machines get cleaned out. Human beings don’t.
-A rape kit is used during a hospital examination, hopefully conducted by a trained member of a sexual assault response team (SART). The process includes the collection of DNA evidence like hair, semen, saliva taken from the victim’s skin, nails, clothing, and genitals. This exam includes oral and rectal exams.
-As part of the collection of evidence, and the medical exam — not performed by untrained legislators — a doctor will also order STD testing and provide a morning after pill to prevent pregnancy. It always bears repeating that the morning after pill is not an abortion in a pill.
-While difficult, frightening and re-traumatizing for most people who have just experienced rape and assault, collection of rape kit evidence is crucially important to the successful prosecution of rapists.
-Rape kit evidence collection is important, but useless unless the kits are tested. Testing rape kits stops predatory rapists from raping again.
-We don’t take rape serious. There are 400,000 untested rape kits languishing in evidence rooms around the United States. There are 20,000 UNTESTED rape kits in Texas alone. Does this mean that 20,000 women’s abortions are waiting to happen in sealed boxes across the state? No.
-A rape kit is not a D and C, which is short for dilation and curettage, a medical procedure conducted by trained medical professionals on behalf of patients, all women, who need to end pregnancies. I know, a French, word. It’s ok. D and Cs are, however, performed in Texas, too, usually when a woman is facing a nonviable pregnancy.
-A rape kit does not cause, prevent or end a pregnancy. Doctors, those are people who go to school to study medicine and biology, can back me up on this.
-BONUS FACT: We live in what is called a “rape-prone” society. Not all humans do.
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