The horrific story of Jane Doe and the Cornell Seven has spurred nationwide outrage and revived contentious debates around prevention and education. But one question is going unasked: Who really pays after a sexual assault? In terms of actual dollars and cents? The answer, Cosmopolitan finds, isn’t good:
Leah received an email from the first hospital. It was a bill for $3,338, including $663 for lab work and a pregnancy test she hadn’t asked for. She hadn’t been charged for the rape kit, but the price of just checking into the ER was $2,241. After her parents’ insurance was applied, she owed $451.06.
“I was so unbelievably angry,” she says. “I lost it. I was like, ‘You mean it cost me $450 to get raped?!’”
Most people don’t realize this care might not be covered, says Vega, who has worked as an emergency room nurse, emergency room director, and a SANE. But that’s actually common: KFF analyzed a sample of insurance claim data from 2016 to 2018 (the most up-to-date data KFF has) and found that 83 percent of women who received a sexual violence diagnosis were billed for treatment. Another analysis of emergency room department data from 2019 found that the average bill for sexual assault survivors was $3,551, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
Nearly all women who attempt to reach the UK in small boats from northern France are raped on their journey, Shabana Mahmoud, the Home Secretary, has said.
The post Nearly All Women Who Try to Reach UK in Small Boats Are Raped During Their Journey, Says Shabana Mahmoud appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell University, situates the lawsuit from a former student alleging she was gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024 within a broader, deeply troubling campus “rape culture.” The specific details of Jane Doe’s case are horrific, but Manne also points to shocking statistics and examples showing that sexual misconduct is rife and often taken less seriously than other student infractions. She is critical of Cornell’s response and culture, but emphasizes that, tragically, this normalization of misogyny is widespread across many American campuses. A disturbing, important read.
In a deeply misogynistic society, groups of boys and men routinely bond over humiliating and exploiting women, as Soraya Chemaly has written. And the victim is not only physically and emotionally traumatized following one of the most fundamental imaginable violations: They are likely to be doubted and undermined at every subsequent step of the process. In Jane Doe’s case, the district attorney did not bring any charges after relying on the investigation done by campus police; they didn’t even speak with the men involved. The district attorney just announced that they are reopening the case on the basis of new information contained in the civil lawsuit, and in recognition of the fact that “it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.”
The San Francisco Police Department cleared 14 percent of rape cases last year—half the national rate. An investigation finds that rape kits get tested fast, only for cases to be quietly shelved. Often, the only thing standing “between a report and the shelf” is what’s known as a “pretext call,” a recorded phone conversation in which a survivor tries to extract an admission of guilt from their attacker (aka relives their trauma to do the police’s work for them):
She sat in a room at the SVU headquarters with [Sergeant Johnathan] Ng and a recorder. She dialed the man she alleged raped her. He didn’t pick up. She tried again. No answer.
“If we don’t get an admission, it’s a he-said, she-said thing,” she remembered Ng telling her.
Then, she said, he offered some unsolicited advice.
“He told me that I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with 55-year-old men,” she said.
Login