America has been rocked for several years with news that thousands and thousands of rape kits — close to a quarter-million documented — have been neglected on shelves in police and crime lab storage in cities from coast to coast. Some sat for decades, an indictment of the way much of this country has too frequently handled one of its most violent, life-altering crimes.
Those are the ones that were kept; many untested rape kits were simply tossed like so much garbage. Actress Mariska Hargitay's Joyful Heart Foundation and related Endthebacklog.org have tried to count the number of untested kits in each state. The results are horrifying, but likely an undercount.
Years after first hearing that news, I can still barely wrap my mind around such unfathomable, criminal neglect. And though jurisdictions nationwide have been tackling the backlog — spurred by public outrage — it is the very meaning of too little and far, far too late.
An unprocessed rape kit is more than a painful testament to the worst day of a person's life. That rape kit is also in some cases a grim portent of terrible things to come for other, future victims. As CNN reported a few months ago, a rape victim's body is a crime scene. And failing to send the evidence collected from that crime scene to the lab or, even worse, destroying that evidence, makes as much sense as checking for blood spatter and fingerprint evidence at a murder scene then torching the place.
Not only does failure to process a rape kit and maintain the evidence dim the likelihood a criminal will be caught and prosecuted, but it also removes any possibility of exonerating a wrongly accused individual using DNA.
In an extraordinary and detailed report, The Atlantic this week provided an inkling of the math, noting how often tested rape kits linked two or more sexual assaults together, providing evidence of a serial rapist. That was true in nearly 1 in 5 tested. When officials in Michigan and Ohio tackled backlogs, they solved hundreds of cold-case rapes and obtained fewer, but still hundreds of convictions.
If you want to reduce crime, complete the process.
Consider, as The Atlantic authors did, "that the great majority of rapists are generalists, or 'one-man crime waves.' 'They will steal your car, they will steal your watch, and they will steal sex, so to speak, if they can get away with it,' says Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at UCLA. 'They are antisocial folks who will commit all sorts of antisocial behavior, including but not limited to sexual aggression.'"
If you want to reduce crime, complete the process.
Words don't exist to capture my hatred of sexual predators, but other thefts occur in an incomplete process that doesn't give evidence a chance to speak for victims and for justice. Choosing not to see that evidence through the process — to save money, to save time, because they alleged sexual assault victim didn't seem convincing enough or important enough or whatever — steal hope of justice and potential safety of others.
Nor is it enough now to vow that we, as a nation and as individual jurisdictions, will do better. Congress should require a full accounting of the rape kits in each state that have been administered and do so going forward. How many are there and how many have been tested? What's the plan for testing the others or why will that not be possible? What's being done to safeguard the secrets they could reveal? What rules allow for their disposal — which has been done with little consistency in different jurisdictions nationwide.
Sexual predators have known for a long time they have a fair chance of getting away with rape. They've done it. The Atlantic investigation noted one serial rapist whose DNA was found in 22 of the previously untested rape kits, his known victims ranging from age 13 to 55.
Not all victims report assault. I suspect more will when "what's the point" is not business as usual.
Want to tackle crime and improve safety? Start here.