There are a number of instances where personal finance meets public finance, and the headlines this past week have given us one particularly grotesque example of that intersection: under VP candidate Sarah Palin's mayoral leadership, the Alaska town of Wasilla charged rape victims for administering evidence-collecting sexual assault exams. That's right, it charged women in the shadow of an assault between three and twelve hundred dollars to collect the evidence necessary to bring their assailants to justice. Wasilla didn't used to charge rape victims for investigating the crimes perptrated against them: that budgetary change was made under Palin's administration. When the state legislature of Alaska finally prohibited this cruel little fundraising trick in 2000, Wasilla was the only town in the state still passing along the cost of its criminal investigations to crime victims.
Any thinking human in favor of a functioning criminal justice system must agree: that's grandly messed up.
As disgusting as it is, it's important to note that Wasilla is not the only town to have shunted off public responsibility onto private citizens in this way. Although they are not supposed to under the Violence Against Women Act (thanks to bill sponsor Senator Joe Biden, by the way, for giving a damn), lots of places do or within recent years have charged rape victims for the privilege of having their assaults investigated. That, in my opinion, is the takeaway message. Even more important than the fact that Sarah Palin is an abhorrent person who thinks rape victims should be charged for going through an invasive, frequently traumatic evidence collection exam so that the state can maybe, just maybe, prosecute their attackers. She ain't the only one, and that fact ought to scare your breakfast out of you.
Being the victim of a crime, and helping the police investigate that crime, should not cost you a few spare hundred bucks. But it's good to know that some people think it should. You wouldn't want to, say, accidentally vote for such a person.
9.18.2008
Personal Finance For Crime Victims
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2 comments:
she also thinks that rape and incest victims should have no access to legal abortion and allows phyllis schafly (she who organized - oh wait, community organizing? i thought we shunned that, now - anyway, who organized the quashing of the equal rights amendment) to stump for her. isn't it amazing when having a woman nominated for executive office is, umm, bad for women? i feel like we're through the looking glass.
btw, palin claims she did not know of the rape-kit-charging practice in wasilla. she SIGNED OFF on it.
OMFG...that's more than adding insult to injury. I never heard of such a thing in ANY kind of crime investigation. Since when do we TAX PAYERS have to PAY more to have the police that we already PAY for to investigate crimes!?! THAT'S completely beyond the scope of my little brain to process...
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