There have been a rash of rape/homicides in India where the victim is found hanging by an article of clothing from a tree after having been raped. The public is becoming more sensitized and outraged and has even come to suspect the police in certain cases of being perpetrators.
I'm trying not to draw any correlations to the US where over 400,000 rape kits are estimated to sit un analyzed in jurisdictions across the land. I'm not trying, but there you have the crux of this issue. Departmental funding aside, the idea that biological material that could convict or exonerate someone wrongly accused, sits deteriorating, in many cases due to inertia, seems ludicrous and derelict.
Should there be a legal time limit to the processing of rape kits that have been collected? It would appear that this is the stage where the process breaks down. The material is being collected so why is there a disconnect at this point? Completion of the kit would prioritize the crime resolution by the accumulation of evidence, or so one would think. We read daily of parties who have gone on to commit numerous other offenses, but if the evidence was collected, and a single perpetrator indicated in a number of crimes, and this was shared information, convictions should follow.
The stigma on rape as a crime has been slow to disappear but the fact remains that rape is a commonplace, violent crime in our society, and regardless of that stigma rape must be dealt with professionally by well trained officers and technicians in tandem.
Can we not move forward?
