Turns out -- to my relief -- my gut reaction to a Houston TV story (picked up by CNN) last week that blasted the Texas attorney general for saddling rape victims "across Texas" with outrageous bills for police investigations in their cases was on target.
I should have trusted it more.
I commented here that: "Journalists occasionally shine light on a public policy so disgusting it literally stuns you -- just takes your breath away and leaves you speechless. Your first thought is they've made a mistake. Or this is ratings hype. It can't be true."
Well, guess what? May is Nielsen month, and officials in Austin are fuming over the KPRC-TV report. And after my own reporting, I see some merit to their claims.
That isn't to say the story should be dismissed altogether as the attorney general's spokesman, who is quoted in it, wants. The woman is on camera, and the bills and the letters denying her request for reimbursement under state law are real.
But the whole situation smells like a kettle of fish. It needs to be flushed out, and I've done some flushing, and I'm going to do some more. But first, I want to make one thing clear.
The most important thing in this situation is that sexual assault victims receive comprehensive treatment in an atmosphere of uncompromised privacy. It's the state's responsibility - by that, I mean the state legislature, the state attorney general, the State Board of Insurance and other state policy makers - to see that state laws, state agency rules and state oversight of private health insurance provide timely, compassionate help to these women.
News media have a responsibility to watch that system and to tell the rest of us how it's working. I tell my journalism students their job is to take a light to the back of the cave. If they see a monster, come back and tell the tribe, but if they don't, never make one up.
With that in mind, here's where I think KPRC veered off course.
There is a monster here, but it isn't exclusively the Texas attorney general or the way his office handled one woman's case. It's a double standard hiding deep in the process Texas uses to respond to all rape crimes, epitomized by the bifurcated response embedded in the way the Texas Victims' Compensation Fund is administered.
The multimillion-dollar program is a great idea. It draws income from several statewide sources, including court and probation fees, donations and federal grants, and it uses that money for a range of victim services. Here is how it comes up short in dealing with rape cases.
Services for one set of clients are simple and easy to navigate. Unfortunately, those clients aren't the rape victims. They are municipal governments, which get money from the victims' fund to pay the cost of police forensic exams (commonly known as "rape kits"), which essentially are local criminal investigations.
The attorney general's website offers easy-to-follow instructions to help local law enforcement receive up to $700 for that work.
Why on Earth aren't cities paying for this?
Cities historically and rightfully pay for criminal investigations within their jurisdictions. The forensic exam in a sexual assault case is the procedural equivalent to the finger printing and photographing detectives do at a robbery or murder scene.
It's a sad day when state lawmakers, the attorney general, city leaders or the police that serve and protect Texas citizens act as if a forensic exam even vaguely resembles a victim service or compensation to a woman who has been raped. And it's a travesty that victim advocates had to do a legislative end-run years ago to get this back-door assistance which, the attorney general likes to boast, usually takes about three days.
So, that's the first group to get served: cities, which have an armada of lobbyists looking after their needs at the Capitol, and cops, which are perhaps the attorney general's strongest and most identifiable constituency group at election time.
The other clients are the rape victims. Unfortunately, their access to the victim's fund and the turn around time they experience when they seek help from it are more complicated and less immediate.
That's because state lawmakers, the attorney general, hospital administrators and insurance companies divide attention women receive when they enter a hospital (often 24 to 48 hours after a rape) into two types of procedures for billing purposes. Work by specially trained nurses that may seem like a single comprehensive process to a victim is split by hospital administrators into either: 1.) the forensic exam (the rape kit) or 2.) personal medical expense.
They actually expect a woman in the physical and emotional condition that follows a rape to understand that division and to make potentially life-saving decisions with financial repercussions accordingly.
Vaginal swabs, blood samples, fingernail scrapes and the Q-tips, glass slides, and wooden sticks used to collect and store evidence typically are included in a forensic exam. That is what local police need to do their job, and the attorney general - not the city or the police department budget - ponies up the money. Nice and tidy.
HIV and pregnancy tests, x-rays and setting broken bones typically are considered personal medical treatment. That is what a victim needs, but that is when she gets a cold shoulder from the state. At least initially.
Legislators and the attorney general believe that even though the woman has consented at this traumatic time to come to the emergency room and to submit to a forensic exam to help police catch a violent criminal, it is her responsibility to recognize the difference between the rape kit and personal medical procedures, and if she allows these "personal medical procedures" to be done, she has tacit responsibility to pay for them.
Ridiculous?
Not in Texas, because when it comes to compensation for rape victims, legislators and the attorney general take the position that the Victims' Compensation Fund is the very last place women should go for help when those bills arrive.
The attorney general's Web site warns:
The Crime Victims' Compensation Fund is the "payer of last resort." It is a secondary source that pays for certain out-of-pocket expenses the victim would be responsible for as a result of the crime. Any other available resources would have to pay before any payment by the Crime Victims' Compensation program.
The Legislature and attorney general want these women to make it easy on the state by navigating the Byzantine and very public system of employer-funded health insurance filings, denial letters, non-profit service applications, dispute resolution and arbitration before they come to the crime victim's fund for help.
The attorney general's spokesman told KPRC that unless strict legislative guidelines are followed in this area, the victims' fund would quickly go insolvent.
Do lawmakers and the attorney general really want to take the position that using the victims' compensation fund to pay the emergency medical treatment women receive when they help law enforcement by voluntarily undergoing a forensic exam will spawn some type of rush to emergency rooms by rape victims - a new group of sexual welfare queens - that will bankrupt the fund?
So what if more of them do come forward and more of them do get life-saving emergency room treatment? Isn't that what we want?
The potential for a bankrupted fund is a red herring, because there's an easy way to do this without costing state taxpayers one additional cent.
Texas should spend the $700 - collected statewide for victim services but under the present system given to local police departments - on actual victim services. Instead of using that money as default compensation for a powerful state interest group and a well-known constituency of the attorney general, use it to defray the cost of emergency medical treatment for women who submit to a forensic exam.
That would pay for HIV and pregnancy tests and go a long way toward covering any triage a rape victim needs when she voluntarily assists police in solving this violent crime.
Those costs shouldn't be billed to her private insurance or entered under her name into any data base that could follow her job-to-job the rest of her life. And this change wouldn't affect the state budget, if lawmakers and the attorney general would just tell cities it's time they all - regardless of their size or their budget priorities - must pay for rape investigations the way they do virtually every other criminal investigation inside their jurisdictions.
I know that victim advocates asked state lawmakers in 2001 to allow victim funds to be used for rape kits. But the argument then was that small town police budgets were so strapped they were ignoring this vital part of gathering evidence. The state should worry more about these women than it does city officials who want to run for re-election claiming they were simultaneously tough on taxes and tough on crime.
The state should mandate local police departments offer a rape kit at their expense to anyone who reports this crime and the state should require police and hospitals to conduct one for any rape victim who requests it.
Houston clearly isn't a small town with a small police department budget, but it seems police there are using a program that was not originally intended for them. I suspect that is happening in other large cities, and that is the story I think KPRC missed by focusing an ad hominem attack on the Texas attorney general.
I filed an open records request with the attorney general's office the day I posted my reaction to the KPRC story. I've asked for information that should shed further light on the situation, and I should know by the end of this week if he plans to provide it or use loopholes in the law to keep it confidential. I'll report his decision as soon as I receive it.
I also talked last week with the attorney general's spokesman and traded an additional half dozen emails with him trying to further understand allegations made by KPRC. I've interviewed an official at the Houston hospital and traded emails with the vice chairman of the Texas House budget committee, the mayor of Houston, a prominent rape victim advocate and several veteran legislative staffers.
I've also received a copy of an e-mail the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault sent to staff and friends last week about the KPRC story. Its subject line reads: untrue stories circulating about rape victims paying for rape kits.
Everyone I've asked has said the woman in the KPRC report is "an isolated case," a "one time thing." They are confident her experience isn't typical for Texas women. (I hope that's true, but of course, persons managing the system have a reason to see it that way.
I've also gone back several times and reviewed the KPRC story. It clearly states the woman is not an isolated instance, and that Texas women are being asked to pay for "giving police the evidence they need to arrest the rapists." That means forensic exams (rape kits), not bills for personal medical services.
It includes this narration:
Along with her emotional scars, this rape victim holds a lap full of bills police promised to pay... this is happening to her and other rape victims across Texas... they are being asked to pay up for giving police the evidence they need to arrest the rapists...
CNN featured the story on its website with the headline, "Texas Rape Victims Billed" and the caption "Texas rape victims suffer more indignation after they receive delinquent bills from hospitals for their own rape kits."
Those are the headlines, captions and reported facts I reacted to (and linked to) when I posted "How can Texas ask women to pay for rape kits?" on this opinion journal.
During subsequent phone interviews, the attorney general's spokesman and hospital's spokeswoman made a number of points that raise questions about the thoroughness of KPRC's news story.
The hospital spokeswoman said her office told the reporter that staff tried 12 times to contact the woman featured in the KPRC report to help her qualify for compensation from the crime victims' fund. Yet, no one from the hospital was quoted by KPRC.
The attorney general's spokesman went further. He said the fund paid for the rape kit in 2007, and the reason the woman received a letter denying compensation from the fund for personal services was she tried to include the rape kit in that claim.
He also said the case remains "open and under consideration," meaning the woman may still qualify for second-tier relief from the fund.
Those points, if true, are important context and should have been noted in the KPRC report.
The attorney general's spokesman said he didn't tell that to KPRC, because the reporter only asked generic questions about the victims' fund and never mentioned anything in connection with specific case involving the woman and her bills, which were the focus of the story.
But the most troubling information I uncovered, the stuff that weighed most heavily on me, came from Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.
Its deputy director told KPRC that the case in question "seemed like an isolated incident because we were aware of no such problem around the state, and we had not received any complaints from victims or police regarding reimbursements for exams from the crime victims compensation fund." That's according to a memo TAASA sent to employees and friends, which was forwarded to me from an old friend in Austin after I posted my reaction to the KPRC report.
If these allegations are true, they constitute serious reporting errors and an equally serious breach in journalism ethics.
KPRC owes viewers a follow-up story to clear the air. Here are three things I'd like to see the station address:
1.The reporter states the victim has bills that "police promised to pay" and that the bills are "for giving police the evidence they need to arrest the rapists." That indicates the bills are for forensic exams, not medical services. Given state law and a claim by the attorney general that the rape kit was paid for in 2007, the reporter should re-examine those claims to make sure the two processes are not inappropriately interchanged in the victims mind or in his reporting.
2.The reporter states, "This is happening to her and other rape victims across Texas." I'd like to know where else this is happening, and get a specific idea of the scope of this situation; and
3.Finally, given the fact that the 2001 change in state law was intended to help small-town police departments, I'd like to know how big city departments are taking advantage of this well-intended law. I'd like to see KPRC provide a list of how many rape kits the victims' fund has paid for in the state's five most populous cities since the law was changed, and how many claims for personal medical expenses the attorney general has denied statewide.
The Texas Legislature is in session for about two more weeks, which means there is time for lawmakers to examine how the compensation fund, created to help crime victims, has veered so off-course.
Lawmakers should debate whether it is right for victims' compensation money to flow so readily to large cities and police departments if, as the KPRC report alleges, women "across Texas" are being saddled with bills for forensic and medical services.
They should consider how many more women might come forward if police paid the traditional and appropriate cost of forensic exams, and the state offered that $700 to victims to defray the cost of HIV tests and other procedures they may not want to bill to their private insurance.
In fact, the state should change the law right now, so women who cooperate with a police investigation automatically receive a life-saving HIV test and a test for pregnancy at no charge along with the state-subsidized rape kit.
Democracies have these conversations, and the public sphere can get messy, but we all should be willing to talk in good faith, and when any of us - lawmakers, state officials, journalists, even bloggers - makes a mess, he or she should be willing to clean it up.