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The crime is very serious, among the most serious of the assault crimes that do not lead to death, and so extra evidence must be found that corroborates the evidence led by the person assaulted.

It has been found in a small minority of investigations that false allegations have been made by a spurned girlfriend, or that the woman who gave consent then decided to make the false claim when her family found out.
Cross examination in a trial can expose some false statements, but not all. In any case, a clever lawyer can create enough doubt in cross examination that may well allow a guilty rapist to go free.
Most victims of rape are not familiar with the courts or are at their ease in court surroundings.

So, to get to the stage where an investigation can usually unravel the truth long before a trial, it is necessary to have more evidence than just the statements of the woman and of the accused man.
Since most rapists commit their assault in places and times where there are no witnesses, this means medical forensic evidence is most likely to be the only additional hard evidence available to an investigating officer and later to a court.

Standard practice by the police, when a rape is reported, is to have the assaulted woman or girl examined immediately as well as taking relevant statements. A standard set of procedures has been developed and the gathering of this medical and forensic evidence is now routine.
Until recently, the medical and forensic report could only be made by a medical doctor, which was fine if the assault took place in a large town or city.

It was far harder to find a suitable doctor, or any doctor, in much of the countryside and in quite a few smaller centres.
So many assaulted women had to wait, without bathing or changing their clothes, until a doctor reported for duty or until transport could be arranged to take them to a larger centre.
This caused two major problems. First some of the evidence, despite precautions, could be lost.

Wounds heal and body fluids can be lost.
Secondly, the assaulted woman had to live with what amounted to even more trauma.
So now the courts allow this evidence to be taken, recorded and given in court by a State Registered Nurse.

The only odd thing about this decision is that it was taken recently and not many years ago when nursing was upgraded into a profession rather than just a vocation. We already trust SRNs to do a great deal in our medical system, from running primary health care clinics to delivering most of our children.
In fact, almost any medical procedure that is routine and does not involve specialist skills is often handled by this large and professional body of men and women, all of whom have a good secondary education followed by a long and gruelling tertiary education.

Examining a raped woman, collecting a set of laid down samples, and making a routine report certainly falls within the category of standard SRN work, and at long last this has been recognised.
A lot has been done since independence to upgrade the way we deal with rape. The courts have played their part by making sure that sentences now equate to the sort of sentences handed out for other serious crimes of assault.

Victim friendly courts have been established that allow evidence to be led and cross examinations to take place in a way that bars the accused man from seeing and intimidating the assaulted person.
The police have developed their own more sophisticated response. Generally a specially-trained officer, usually a woman, takes the evidence from the assaulted woman. This allows detailed questions to be asked without threat, and also helps the police separate out the true claims, the overwhelming majority, from the false reports.

Now the additional evidence can be obtained promptly, with the SRNs allowed to collect this evidence. All that is now needed is to ensure that the “rape kits” are readily available at a designated clinic near every police station in the country along with the instructions so that this extension of evidence gathering is practical as well as legal.
At the same time women’s organisations, churches and everyone else interested in seeing justice done must continue encouraging all women and girls who are raped to report the crime immediately. Rape is a difficult crime to investigate or prove days, let alone months, after the assault. It is relatively easy to prove when the report is made promptly and all statements and medical evidence gathered within hours of the assault.

And those men worried that the law has swung too far to women should think the matter through. Prompt evidence clears the innocent as well as convicting the guilty.
No one needs to go through life with that doubt among the public that he only “got off” because a conviction on the substandard evidence available to the court would be deemed unsafe. Much better for a falsely accused man to be cleared long before the trial because there was adequate evidence to make it clear he was innocent.

We should not forget that having adequate samples taken soon after an assault opens the door to DNA testing in difficult cases, which can pretty well determine who did commit the assault and, just as importantly, who did not.