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The True Cost of Rape in America

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.

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Her Rape Kit Had a DNA Match. In San Francisco, That’s Not Enough.

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.

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