A standard rape kit.
NBC News reported this week some alarming statistics about rape. Upon an analysis of roughly 1,000 police department entities across the United States, they found over 70,000 unprocessed rape examination kits.
Here's the kicker -- there are over 18,000 police departments in the United States.
Those 1,000 police departments represent a paltry 5% of all American law enforcement bodies. If that average holds true for the other 95% of police departments, that means there's probably one million or more unprocessed rape kits spread from coast to coast.
Wrap your head around that number for a minute, folks.
1,000,000.
That's 1,000,000 rapes. 1,000,000 instances of violence. 1,000,000 predatory acts going unpunished. Countless droves of rapists walking the streets, with no sense of accountability. 1,000,000 women with no support from the justice system, which supposedly has their best interest in mind. 1,000,000 women forced to endure an invasive and painful rape kit examination. All for nothing.
A literal mountain of rape kits, sitting unprocessed in a warehouse.
Currently, a rape kit will cost about $1,000 to fully process, from start to finish. Sure, processing 1,000,000 rape kits all at once would cost a whopping billion dollars ($1,000,000,000). Let's compare that number to what our government has spent on other more useless things, though.
- War on Terror = $1.7 Trillion
- War on Drugs = $1 Trillion
- Vietnam Conflict = $950 Billion (Adjusted For Inflation)
- F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Jet Fleet (Currently 7 Years Behind Schedule) = $400 Billion
- 2012 Presidential Race = $2.6 Billion (Total, All Parties)
This doesn't even take into account the fact that the rape kit backlog goes back as far as TWENTY YEARS in some places! You mean to tell me that over two decades, our government couldn't find a billion dollars worth of change in the proverbial couch? Give me a frickin' break.
There's only one reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these figures. It's not that we can't afford to process the shameful flood of unprocessed rape kits...
Our own government simply does not give a damn.
Why? Because it's run by men. Unfortunately, women represent only a fraction of our elected government officials.
- 19.4% of Congress
- 24.8% of all State Governors
- 24.2% of all State Representatives
- 17.6% of all Mayors
I can wholly guarantee you this -- if women properly represented half of all government officials (they make up 50.8% of the total population), that backlog of rape kits would not exist. This isn't a matter of being a feminist, or supporting equal rights for all (which I do). It's merely common sense. Men can be aggressive assholes; just ask the women they rape. Over 93% of all perpetrators of rape are men. I'm not saying every man elected to a government office is a rapist -- far from it. What I am saying is that without an equal number of female voices to address the concerns of women, our government will continue to not do anything about rape.
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