Someone made a mistake,” said Sharon Thomas, manager of Polk County Victim Services.

Boy, did they ever.

A16-year-old Cedar Falls girl said that she had been raped by a 16-year-old boy in his pick-up truck parked in a Des Moines parking garage.

After reporting the crime to law enforcement authorities, friends of the girl took her to the Blank Children’s Hospital.

The staff checked her vital signs, but refused to perform a sexual-abuse examination on the girl without parental consent.

The girl said her mother was not home. The staff then refused to go ahead with the exam but told her not to shower or engage in any activity that could further bias the results of the sex-abuse exam while she tried to reach her mother.

The girl, after eventually reaching her mother, finally received her examination, 12 hours after she first visited the hospital and 14 hours after the alleged attack occurred.

Sound like a better safe than sorry policy?

Wrong.

Hospitals don’t need parental consent to do such examinations. Iowa law mandates that minor-age victims of sexual abuse crimes may receive immediate treatment without prior consent or even knowledge of the parents.

Somebody at the hospital didn’t know that. Somebody messed up. And messed up good.

It was an honest mistake, to be sure, with no malicious intent motivating the screw-up.

But this sad incident says something about our society.

It says strictly following a policy (which the hospital staffers thought they were doing) is more important than helping out our fellow human beings in need.

Following rules and regulations is valued more highly than the safety of victims of rape.

Is our society, continuously wrapped in litigation for one thing or another, so paralyzed with fear that we are unwilling to come to the aid of others?

If so, it is a sad day indeed.

It’s bad enough the hospital staffers were unaware of the policy for treating under-age victims of sex abuse.

What’s even worse is, even if the policy did exist, the girl still was denied help and treatment.

Lawsuits and litigation be damned. Somebody should have helped that girl, and worried about themselves afterward.