Elizabeth Nolan Brown on Charging Rape Victims for Forensic Testing
To hear many people tell it these days, the most pressing concern when it comes to sexual assault is making non-enthusiastic consent a crime. Yet there are much bigger barriers to emboldening victims than an insufficiently robust consent statute, Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes. In many states, victims of sexual assault are being forced to shoulder some or all of the cost of testing their bodies for forensic evidence. We don't ask home-invasion victims to cover the cost of dusting for fingerprints or the families of homicide victims to subsidize blood spatter analysis. So why should rape victims have to pay the state to investigate?