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DENVER (AP) — Despite calls to reduce sexual violence on college campuses, few college health centers have access to forensic sexual assault exams.
That problem extends to Colorado, where only one college campus has the so-called "rape kits," or SANE exams, which can reveal injuries and collect DNA evidence.
KUNC reports that the exam kits aren't available (http://bit.ly/1AhSLqZ ) on the University of Colorado's Boulder campus, which has 30,000 students. In fact, the exams aren't offered in Boulder County.
The nearest hospital that offers these exams is in Westminster, 20 miles away. CU advises students to go to Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, which is even farther.
"It's dumbfounding to me, for a place like Boulder County, that we do not have the ability to have sexual assault survivors get a SANE exam done," Boulder sex crimes prosecutor Katharina Booth said.
CU isn't alone, a Rocky Mountain PBS I-News investigation has found.
The 25,000 students at Colorado State University's main campus in Fort Collins must also travel to Loveland for exams.
In Colorado, only Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction provides the exam at a hospital adjacent to campus.
Of the top 100 colleges as ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 2014, only four provide the exams in their student health centers. Twenty-two schools offer them at university-affiliated hospitals, according to a survey by CU religious studies professor Lucas Carmichael and CU graduate Nevada Drollinger-Smith.
Jada Gruber, who talked to KUNC, was assaulted in 2011 in Boulder. She went to Boulder Community Hospital, which couldn't give her medical attention or collect evidence. Instead, she was driven in the back of a police car to the police station. In an interrogation room, she was coached to do her own exam.
"They brought in a female officer to give me a debriefing on what kind of swabs I needed to be doing on myself," Garber said. "They gave me a few long Q-Tips, and asked me to swab a few places on my body, and then she took pictures of a few random cuts that I had had and any kind of bruises that I had on my body."
Her attacker, Davin Burke-Reinhart, was convicted on two counts of felony sexual assault in 2012.
The Boulder District Attorney's office is working to bring a SANE program to Boulder Community Hospital. The hospital hopes to offer exams by early 2015, hospital spokesman Rich Sheehan said.
"I think we miss a large majority of our sexual assault survivors coming forward, getting the care they need or deciding to report to police, because when they're turned away (from the hospital) they go home," Booth said.
In August, CMU started paying into a collaborative of on-call SANE nurses to make the exam available at Grand Junction's Community Hospital.
"You just have to find the resources, you have to be able to get the help of people around you to get this service given to students," said Danny Sandoval, who directs CMU's advocacy and health office.
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Information from: KUNC-FM, http://www.kunc.org/
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