Remember back when the excruciatingly simple Sarah Palin was running for office (who could forget!) and one of the many scandalous, mystifying tidbits surrounding her was the fact that she made people who were sexually violated buy their own rape kits? Well, it turns out that Palin wasn’t alone in crafting up these ridiculous rules.

Victims of rape have had to pay up to $1,200 for their own rape kits, hospital expenses and exams during active investigations. There was actually a law created by Congress to prevent rape victims from being charged for their rape kits fifteen years ago. State or local authorities are supposed to be required to cover these expenses, but loopholes and bureaucratic BS have managed to send the bill to plenty of victims instead.

$1,200? That’s a mortgage payment, for god’s sake! And as hard as it is for both women and men who are raped to even muster the courage to report the crimes against them, and then to endure a lengthy, uncomfortable exam for physical evidence—when surely all they’d rather do is wash all that horrifying evidence away—we’re actually allowing them to be billed for it as well?

Human Rights Watch research Sarah Tofte points out that “we never ask a robbery victim to pay for the cost of fingerprints.”

Indeed we don’t. I doubt we bill dead people for their own blood spatter analysis or coronary reports, either. And we shouldn’t require people who have been violated in one of the worst ways inhumanly possible to pay for the collection of the evidence from the crime that they experienced!

And the fact remains that even if you do this—say you bravely report your crime, go to the hospital and have your exam—you’re still not guaranteed to have your evidence even processed! Advocates encourage victims to report, report, report—and report they certainly should!—but where is the justice, or even hope of justice, when more than 350,000 untested DNA samples remain sitting around in police stations nationwide, just being wasted because they’re “backlogged.”

Thankfully the Violence Against Women Act, which is supposed to prevent women from having to pay for their exams, has to be reauthorized before 2011, which leaves room to strengthen the legislation. While Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has introduced legislation to strengthen the bill, we must make sure that it includes stronger, clearer mandates in order to protect victims, ensure they are not charged for their own evidence collection, and get their evidence processed. We can do this by continuing to ask our Congress members to support the Act, its enforcement, and its strengthening.