If you’re looking for good (well, good-ish) news for women in Texas, here’s something. Thanks to an 11 million dollar budget appropriation for the Texas Department of Public Safety, thousands of untested rape kits can finally be analyzed
Which is cool, for a second, until you do a double-take on that line: thousands of untested rape kits.
So this triumph is sort of marred by the fact that there was a severe backlog for so many years. The guestimate is somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 untested rape kits. Holy shit, right?
And it’s the result of “tight budgets, overworked crime labs” and “the determination by some law enforcement agencies that there was insufficient cause to test a kit.” Which to me translates to, “women are not a priority.”
Meanwhile Texas is all like, “This is great, look at all the crimes it might finally solve, lol.”
…not a direct quote, but you get my point. It’s great that this might be able to put some rapists behind bars, and a similar 2003 grant that allowed for testing identified 3 serial rapists. But come on, Texas, that’s just lazy.
Article and Image via NYtimes.com
