I badgered the Pittsburgh police sex assault unit about my case every few years for more than two decades. They finally tested my kit in 2013. It took months and cost the county $4,000, but it proved more than worthwhile — a match was made with an ex-convict who had recently been arrested in Brooklyn, and prosecution was mobilized.

While I was frustrated that I had to fight to get my kit out of storage, I understand that my old rape was competing with murders and with more recent rapes. There weren’t the resources to do more without compromising the current caseload. I’m just deeply grateful that my kit was created in the first place, and that it was kept so well: not just physically well, so as to be still testable after all that time, but also with an intact chain of custody that protected its status as legitimate evidence.

There’s a justified impression that the backlog of untested rape kits is, at least in part, a result of indifference on the part of the police and others in authority dismissing rape as unworthy of prosecution. But this part of the backlog, made of pre-Codis kits like mine, was a result of forward-thinking and diligent police and medical personnel who cared so much about rape that they collected and kept evidence that they, at the time without a database to match up to, would not themselves get to take to court.

In 2015, grants from the federal government and the Manhattan district attorney’s office totaling $79 million were aimed at testing the national backlog. But it’s still common for kits, especially older kits, to fall through the cracks. In layman’s understanding, “backlog” refers to “all untested kits,” but in some jurisdictions it can refer only to kits that have made it into the crime lab testing queue and not yet been gotten to. Evidence kits that went directly to storage can be left out of these numbers entirely.

Even when crime labs intend to include stored kits in their numbers, that is not necessarily easy to do. A lab can test only those kits that the police submit to it. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for example, where my kit was tested and which was granted $254,000 last year to clear its backlog, evidence storage is split among many different authorities: the county police, the Pittsburgh police and small police jurisdictions for more than a hundred municipalities outside Pittsburgh. The Allegheny County lab requires the initiative of dozens of different forces just to count the kits. The grant money is providing the means to get known kits tested. It’s my hope that it will also, in every jurisdiction that accepts the money, provide the impetus to uncover the older kits that could so easily be overlooked.