Sick of Getting Googled By This Stupid Post

If your plans for the weekend include hitting a campus party, getting drugged, raped anally, and then being denied medical care, make sure you hit up DC. That is exactly what happened to a 19 year-old woman, and now she is suing GW Hospital, the District of Columbia, and Howard University Hospital. Both hospitals and the police department all refused to administer a rape kit. Why? The young girl "appeared" to be intoxicated. Well, no shit! She was at a party, and then drugged. I bet she was pretty out of it! According to court documents, she was vomiting and drifting in and out of consciousness. So yeah, I can see why they would make the leap that she wasn't raped and didn't deserve the most basic of medical treatments. I can totally get behind BOTH hospitals decisions to send an obviously sick rape victim home without care. Good call.

So if she was drunk that night, what is their excuse for when she went to the hospital the next morning, to request a kit be taken, and they refused her again? To those of you who don't know, a rape kit collects body fluids, tissues, and hairs that a rapist might leave behind on a woman's body. That means this woman refrained from cleaning herself, in the hopes that the cold light of day would improve her chances of proving her case against her attacker in court. Howard turned her down, the police turned her down, and then GW turned her down. This woman was going to a lot of trouble to get her ass swabbed. You would think someone could take five minutes to do it.

My question is, why does being drunk preclude you from being administered a rape kit? You have to give consent. I get that. But if you are drunk and raped, you did not give consent. And that's... ok I guess? Another point to take into consideration is that her first hospital of choice was Howard , a historically black school, leading one to wonder if the victim was African American, and therefore even more prone to shitty medical care? So, to the doctors and police, I guess this fell into either the A.) She was drunk and asking for it, or B.) She's black, both, apparently, groups that do not deserve to have their rapes taken seriously.

If anything good comes out of this, I hope that it's a policy that demands that any woman who claims to be raped is given a rape kit, whether she is drunk or not. It's hard enough for women to come forward, to go to the hospital and let strangers probe around in the recently violated areas of her body, then to subject herself to the scrutiny of the police, the courts, the public. Rape kits should be SOP for women coming in under the auspices of sexual assault, regardless of their intoxication levels. Depending on the situation, she might not even know she had been raped at that point.

Being drunk is NOT an reason to be raped. Women have the right to go out and get loaded and not worry about having their bodies violated. It's not women being irresponsible, it's men not respecting boundaries and basic human rights. That woman had the right to go out to a party, without worrying about getting drugged and ass raped. When it did happen, she had the right to go to the hospital and receive immediate attention, regardless of her blood alcohol lever. What the hospitals and the police did is play into the blame the victim mentality that has rape victims scared to come forward.

This whole situation makes me sick. The next time I go to DC, I am wearing my steel panties and drinking from a sippee cup. And if you get a chance, call George Washington Hospital, toll free, at 1.888.449.4677 and ask for Dr. Christopher Lang. Ask him if it was his personal policy, or that of the hospital, to refuse treatment of a rape victim. Give Howard University Hospital a call, ask them the same thing, at 202.865.6100. Then, go ahead and call Sergeant Ronald Reid of the Metropolitan Police Department, at 202.727.4218, and ask him if it's policy, or that of the department to claim that no crime has been committed without first launching the most basic of investigations.

This all really gives a whole new meaning to cover your ass. Sad, sad days.