So, RAINN's Scott Berkowitz wrote an op-ed for CNN about Maryland v. King, in which the Supreme Court will decide the future of DNA evidence taken from suspects and/or the CODIS system in which DNA markers are stored. It's an interesting piece, although it's certainly an incomplete discussion without caveats about how DNA evidence is only as reliable as the people collecting and processing it are ethical.
Anyway. It's worth a read, with the note that there are descriptions of violent crimes against women in the piece.
I do wonder, however, if CNN could have possibly found a more absurdly inappropriate image to accompany the article.
The fuck, CNN? An image of a disembodied mouth that reads female with a swab positioned to enter the barely parted lips, handler of swab totally removed, is about the most inappropriate possible image that could have been used in association with a story about DNA collection from suspects and its efficacy in solving rape cases, of which the victims are disproportionately women and the perpetrators disproportionately men.
Not only is the (intentional? unintentional?) innuendo of this image pretty evident, which is a gross accompaniment to a story about rape, but when I look at this image, because the mouth reads as female, what I see is a victim being swabbed as part of a rape kit, which is not at all the focus of this case.
So if I'm instead meant to see a rapist, ha ha, well isn't it just perfect that the one time a human that reads female is supposed to represent "default human" is when that form is meant to be a suspected rapist.
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