Most Rape Cases Are About Consent, Not DNA

The backlog of untested rape kits causes continuous outcry among women’s advocates. Wendy Murphy says this focuses on the wrong issue because most rape cases are about consent, not who did it.

 (WOMENSENEWS)–Throughout the country we hear constant outcry about DNA rape kits that never get tested.Women’s eNews has run commentaries about this supposed outrage and just two weeks ago The New York Times reported on a presumably shocking stockpile of untested kits in Texas. A couple of years ago, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof compared the problem to something more likely to occur in Afghanistan than the United States, which turned up the clamor about untested kits.

The U.S. legal system may be embarrassingly bad at providing meaningful redress for rape victims, but untested DNA kits are not the problem. To the contrary. Public attention to the untested kits makes the problem of systemic injustice worse because it saps precious resources and distracts us from the real issues.

DNA testing is not only a red herring wrapped up in a Trojan horse, it’s a gigantic neon whale, stuffed inside a Trojan elephant-in-the-room.

Rape kits may be stacked up in criminal evidence closets all over the country, but not because there isn’t enough money or political will to demand testing. It’s because as many as 90 percent of the kits contain evidence that is, at most, irrelevant.

Eighty-five percent of victims know their attackers and the defense is focused on consent, not whether the act occurred. In such cases, DNA tells us nothing about the issue in dispute. A rape kit could contain the DNA of three men, five sheep and the Loch Ness monster, and it would have nothing to do with whether the victim consented to sex on the night in question. (Read more)