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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Women are at about 3x the risk of men for intimate partner violence, which includes sexual assault -- see http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolenc... for extensive background.

While I strongly object to mass DNA testing of the type proposed here, the DA's comment should be read in the light of the huge backlog that exists for testing rape kits. Denver, CO's clearance rate is only about 30%, and there was until recently a strong bias towards testing cases involving stranger assault but not assault from family members: http://www.endthebacklog.org/denver

So without endorsing the DA's call, it us based on a legitimate public policy issue rather than purely emotional grandstanding.

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The bias against testing rape kits when a family member was the alleged rapist comes from the difficulty of prosecuting cases where both people agree that sex happened, but one says it was rape and the other says it was consensual.

There's not much point testing DNA in those cases because it doesn't help you decide if consent was gained.

(I agree with your post, btw.)

I totally agree, but one reason to do so anyway* is because of the non-zero probability that someone who attracts a rape accusation from one person may well predate upon others, sequentially or in parallel. A topical example would be Bill Cosby, who's now accused by some 50 women of sexual assault, many of whom said they kept silent for years because he was so famous and they thought nobody would believe them.

* which is fraught with its own ethical pitfalls re. DNA storage, but is in line with current US legal mores, if not your or my personal ideals on privacy.

An accusation alone is not grounds to keep your DNA information around forever. A conviction is another matter.

Playing the devils advocate here but why keep convicts' DNA forever? Should ex convicts not have a right to privacy? I can imagine they might need some way to keep track of inventory in the prison system but once you've served the time, why keep the DNA? Just to make the cops' jobs easier? If there is a false positive on an ex convict's DNA, it still means we got the wrong guy.

Since there's an actual conviction, that's a separate matter but I tend to agree.

How would DNA storage of rape kits help the Cosby case at all? The police can collect Cosby's DNA if he is a suspect in a case.

It wouldn't. I mentioned that case in the context of (apparent) serial predation and information asymmetry.

Just think about it for a second

I strongly support fixing the backlog of rape kit testing, and if I thought that's what he meant I wouldn't object. Perhaps he was quoted out of context. What I heard was a very old, very tired, very patriarchal attitude of "join me, fellow men, to protect the women and children!" I am not the kind of feminist who resents a door being held open for her, but this quote rubbed me the wrong way.

You might very well be correct - it's one big downside of DA being an elective office, which is something I'll never get used to. My mind just jumped to the rape kit problem immediately on reading your first post, so I just went with the flow of the intuition.

I am not sure what is intimate partner violence but 40% of victims 'being hit' by their partner are men, and in most cases of 'being hit', women start it - predominantly under the assumption that no one will hit them back because a) they are women b) society still goes gaga after 'women and children' and not men c) in practice women are protected from any consequence of hitting a man but men are by default assumed guilty until proven innocent.

For example, while VAWA talks about non-gendered domestic violence, in practice only one partner is arrested so the other can be allowed to take care of children and in 100% of cases where both parties got into a physical altercation it is MEN who end up in jail and with a restraining order.

In a study from Sweden a few years ago, it showed that women and men report essentially equal amount of violence in the home, which throws a big wrench into the perception of women as the perpetual victim and men as the perpetual aggressor.

But even more interestingly the study showed that men and women choose different method in physical violence, and that has a major impact on injures. Men favors unarmed methods by the use of their hands, while women favor knives or improvised weapons. In average the unarmed method cause more often damage which need the attention of medical help, while armed combat during domestic violence causes more damage in those rare instances where medical help was needed. The explanation for this is that combat with improvised weapons is simply harder to do than unarmed.

All but one of my 8 closest male friends have been slapped by ex-girlfriends. I don't usually see any testimonial for this behavior in statistics. There could be a strong bias against men.

Possible, but in the spirit of statistical rigor this could also mean that 7 of your friends dated the same violent woman.

Possible bias in your choice of close male friends? That looks like a little over one data point rather than eight. To counter with one data point, it has never happened to me (male).

Intimate partner violence is pretty much the least likely application I can imagine for a database of random strangers' DNA. What is the scenario? "My husband hit me in the head and I got amnesia, so I don't know who my husband is"?

FYI, that CDC survey defines rape as penetration only. They don't count forced envelopment.

> the DA's comment should be read in the light of the huge backlog that exists for testing rape kits

Except grabbing DNA information from private companies databases is only potentially useful IF those kits are tested. Testing the kits is orthogonal to clearing the cases.

Quite so. it would have been better for me to say 'could be read in the light of' as opposed to 'should be..'

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