It’s a situation sparked by revelations that a woman who was raped in Nova Scotia, had to wait three days for a specialized team to meet her and get evidence.
She was told not to shower for three days, “”I couldn’t shower. I had to take my clothes that I wore that night and put them in a plastic bag, so that the evidence wouldn’t be tampered with and that’s basically about it. I wasn’t allowed to shower,” she said. “That was really hard to deal with because when something like that happens, you just want to feel clean again.”
There are only two regions in the province with specialized teams trained to respond to victims’ needs and do the required testing. Halifax has a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) team of 15 registered nurses. It responds to all metro hospitals within one hour of a victim reporting to triage. The provincial Health Minister says the situation is unacceptable. In this case however weather was a factor, but efforts are to be made to improve SANE services in the province.
However, the case has also highlighted concerns over the nationally distributed kit used to collect evidence for rape cases, which some are calling obsolete.
The standardized evidence kits are distributed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to hospitals across the country.
But now some are saying the kits, with plastic bags, and the type of swavs are not up to date with forensic technology. They also say the kit’s requirement for DNA comparison to take scalp hair samples- about 80-100 hairs and also pubic hair, is no longer required. As the co-ordianator of Nova Scotia’s SANE programme says, it also puts the victim through additional stress, embarrassement and trauma, and advises all medical staff to ignore those steps.
“We know that DNA can be degraded by warm, moist environments where bacteria and fungus can grow, so plastic is not always the most appropriate way to store biological evidence. So we add paper bags,” said Heather Blackburn, co-ordinator of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program in Antigonish.
“We also use a different type of swab that dries faster, so that we can preserve that evidence in a better way.”
The RCMP says a new rape evidence kit has been developed, but they are not saying when it will be released.
* With files from Angela MacIvor, CBC news
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