In the United States, it has become increasingly clear over the course of the last five years that we have a rape kit backlog problem.

When someone is raped and informs a hospital, the police, or a rape treatment center of a sexual assault within a week of the crime, she is asked to have a sexual assault forensic evidence kit collected at a hospital. The examination is a lengthy, invasive 4-6 hour process in which a medical professional swabs, plucks, and brushes into envelopes any DNA left in or on a rape victim's body. The envelopes are sealed, and then placed in a cardboard box or larger envelope. The box or envelope is referred to as a "rape kit."

Most Americans with a general knowledge of our criminal justice system assume that rape kit evidence is sent for testing automatically after it is booked into police evidence. As DNA has played an increasingly important role in our criminal justice system, even laypeople grasp how vital DNA evidence is in resolving rape cases. Rape kit testing can identify an unknown assailant, confirm the presence of a known suspect, affirm a victim's version of events, discredit a suspect's story, identify serial rapists by connecting individual crime scenes, and exonerate innocent suspects. Rape kit testing sends a crucial message to victims that their cases matter. It puts assailants on notice that the criminal justice system takes their crimes seriously.

And yet, experts estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the country—the exact number remains elusive because the federal government does not track rape kit data. In fact, only four states require tracking and testing of rape kit evidence—Illinois, Texas, Colorado by statute, and Ohio through a directive from the Attorney General. Nearly everything we know about the rape kit backlog in cities around the United States comes not from government reporting, but from the hard work of human rights researchers, journalists, and victim's rights advocates.

For the general public, the fact that there is a rape kit backlog is astounding. How could a country known for its tough-on-crime policing let key evidence in rape cases languish? The answers say a lot about how poorly the United States responds to sexual violence, and how far we have to go to realize our commitment to advance women's rights. Those who live close to the reality of sexual violence in the United States—survivors, victim service providers, experts—may be dismayed when another rape kit backlog is uncovered in yet another police storage closest or freezer, but they are not surprised. They know that very few rape cases make it very far in the criminal justice system, and that the rape kit backlog is a tangible symbol of our accumulated criminal justice failures to take rape—and rape victims—seriously.

When a rape kit backlog is discovered in a community, law enforcement often initially blames limited resources and the high cost of testing rape kits as justification for untested rape kits. It is true that rape kit testing is more expensive than other kinds of DNA tests. Each kit can cost an average of $1,200-1,500 to test. The rapid expansion of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system has put an incredible stress on crime laboratories. And unfortunately, the increase in DNA test requests to crime laboratories has not always been accompanied by an increase in the personnel and resources needed to test rape kit evidence in a comprehensive and timely manner.

Resources are certainly a part of why rape kits that are sent by the police to a crime lab for testing wait for weeks, months and, in some cases, even years to be tested, but resources cannot explain the rape kits stuck in police storage facilities that were deemed "unworthy" of testing by detectives. A 2009 National Institute of Justice survey of law enforcement officers found that evidence in sexual assault cases was the least likely among all violent crimes to be given testing priority. The cases most likely to have DNA evidence tested were property crimes. To understand why rape kits are such a low priority for police, it's important to place the rape kit backlog in the context of the criminal justice system's historically anemic response to sexual violence.

The United States has struggled to make progress in the way its criminal justice system addresses violence against women and girls. It is only in the last 40 years that laws and systems have been put in place to: record the prevalence of sexual violence; provide advocates who guide victims through the system; educate and raise awareness about the causes and consequences of sexual violence; prohibit a victim's prior sexual activity from being entered into evidence; eliminate the requirement that there be a corroborating witness to a rape in addition to the victim; and create procedures to collect physical evidence from victims. Police and prosecutors have now been trained extensively in how to move cases forward, and special sexual assault investigative and prosecutorial units are common in most major cities.

Despite these reforms, the number of reported rapes that lead to an arrest, much less a conviction, remains intractably small. In 2011, the arrest rate for rape was 24%, which was exactly what it was in the late 1970s when the FBI first began tracking such data. Too many rape cases in this country don't just remain unresolved—they remain uninvestigated.

There are many reasons why rape cases are handled so ineffectively. One big reason is law enforcement's approach to assessing rape cases and the credibility of rape victims. All too often, there is an intense and narrow focus on whether the victim is telling the truth, or the circumstances of her life before the rape. To be fair, law enforcement is simply reflecting our society's penchant to do the same. Yet this intense focus takes attention away from the real problem—the perpetrators.

In my research over the past seven years on the rape kit backlog, I have had the opportunity to look through thousands of rape case files, from Illinois to Los Angeles, Detroit to Massachusetts. Most of the files consist of a single page, containing the victims' initial report of the crime to the police. That is where the investigation begins and ends. In so many cases, there is no attempt to interview a known suspect, or to test the evidence that might track down an unknown suspect. There is no attempt to interview witnesses, even when the victim indicates there were some. There is no attempt to track down any video from security cameras in the area that may have captured the assault. There is nothing but the victim's story, and then the officer's notes. In the majority of these cases, the victims give statements to indicate they have struggled along the margins through a painful and rough life.

Whereas experts know that it is those very struggles that make someone more vulnerable to sexual assault, law enforcement often see it differently. Too many times, as I look at case files, I find notes in the margins from officers that they think justifies their scant work on a case: "victim is a known whore;" "victim is a mental case;" or, simply, "prostitute" or "drug addict."

That is why I am not surprised that the rape kits in Ohio's backlog belong mostly to marginalized women who have struggled with mental illness or drug addiction. I am also not surprised that many of these cases link to serial killers—perpetrators choose their victims wisely, targeting women whom are easy targets and whose rape reports the police are likely to do very little about. I would guess that in these cases that got left behind, police decided very early on in the investigation that the victim was not credible or worth the cost of an aggressive investigation, including the act of testing her rape kit.

When I make these points to law enforcement, they argue that in so many of the cases connected to their rape kit backlog, the victims themselves decided "not to cooperate" or "not to press charges." I find this explanation wanting, without a better understanding of what led the victim to make that decision, if indeed she did. In some cases, it seems clear that an officer's initial treatment of a victim—full of skepticism of her story and blame for her predicament—pushed the survivor away from the process.

Rape kit testing will not solve all rape cases, but it has the ability to move more of them forward. National studies have shown that cases in which a rape kit was collected, tested, and contained DNA evidence of the offender's contact with a victim were significantly more likely to move forward in the criminal justice system than cases in which there was no rape kit collected, or there were no rape kit test results. A system that requires the testing of all rape kits can also help chip away the influence police bias has in assessing reported rapes. If officers are required to investigate every rape report they receive to the full extent—including testing a rape kit—they may be surprised to find they have a case worth pursuing, and offenders worth catching.

In order to clear the rape kit backlog in the United States, and ensure that it never recurs, state and federal rape kit policies must change. While progress on rape kit reform has been slow, it is happening. Cities and states are going into their storage facilities and counting their rape kits to assess whether they have a backlog. Jurisdictions with backlogs are finding the resources to test their rape kits, changing their policies to prevent future backlogs, and devoting the resources necessary to fully investigate all leads from rape kit testing. State legislatures are introducing and enacting laws that require statewide tracking and testing of rape kits. The federal government is offering leadership, resources, and research to fix the problem. Congress is currently debating the largest rape kit-related funding bill in its history—$117 million that will help states reform their approach to rape kit testing within the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Bills for fiscal year 2014.

These changes may be cold comfort to the survivors who have made the difficult decision to have a rape kit collected, and to report the crime to the police, only to have the police abandon their cases soon after. But law enforcement still has a chance to make things closer to right. They can start by learning from their mistakes in these cases, and turning all that energy away from judging a victim's worth, and focusing instead on the offenders who keep getting away with rape over and over again.

Tofte, director of Policy & Advocacy for the

has worked for more than a decade on criminal justice responses to sexual and domestic violence. She is an expert on the rape kit backlog in the United States. She investigated, researched and wrote extensively about untested rape kits while previously working for Human Rights Watch.

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