There Are 400,000 Unprocessed Rape Kits in the U.S. How Can This Be?
There Are 400,000 Unprocessed Rape Kits in the U.S. How Can This Be?
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-actress-mariska-hargitay-speaks-to-journalists-as-she Actress Mariska Hargitay is producing a documentary about America's rape kit backlog.
Not everyone can be as fierce and effective as the fictional detective Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU. But Benson’s real-life alter ego, actress Mariska Hargitay, is similarly committed to solving sex crimes. In 2004, inspired by fan letters from rape survivors, she established the Joyful Heart Foundation, an activist group that seeks to quench violence against women. They’ve raised more than $14 million, and now Hargitay will continue her advocacy by producing a documentary, Shelved, about the more than 400,000 rape kits gathering dust throughout the United States—casualties of underfunded police departments and a culture that still struggles to take sexual assault seriously.
In Washington, the needle seems to be shifting ever so slightly. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden announced a White House proposal to pour $35 million into testing backlogged rape kits and bringing sex offenders to justice. That’s good news—the unprocessed evidence constitutes a disgraceful failure of law enforcement. Anti-rape activists are quick to point out that, although one-third of women experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, only 3 in 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in jail. And as Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress observes, it’s a question not only of low reporting rates, but also of the slipperiness of defining and prosecuting sexual violations: “Of the rapes that are reported to the police,” she writes, “only about one out of four leads to an arrest—and of those arrests, only about one out of four leads to a conviction.” (And that's not because many of the reports are false: As my colleague Amanda Marcotte has noted in the past, false rape accusations are rare.)
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There’s the easy answer and the hard one. Easy is that rape kits cost a lot to analyze—anywhere between $500 and $1,500 each. But on closer investigation, this excuse, floated by police departments, reveals its big flaw: Interpreting evidence in general is a wildly expensive process; digital forensic analysis—of a single computer—might set a department back $5,000, while the average cost of processing any case with DNA evidence is $1,397. Despite this, I'm guessing murders and other instances of nonsexual violence don’t get shoved down into the collective subconscious quite the way rapes do.
A bleaker and more compelling explanation is that, for a long time, our culture has refused to call sex crimes what they are: crimes. When a sense of blame or responsibility clings to the victim, it’s easier for cops to set her case aside. And the blurriness (or perception of same) surrounding a lot of rape allegations doesn’t inspire much optimism among prosecutors that they can score a conviction—so, overworked and underfunded, they don’t even try. I wonder, too, whether hypermasculine values in law enforcement have created a mini bro climate. The Village Voice reported two years ago on NYPD officers who urged street cops to manipulate crime statistics by downgrading reports of sexual assault. One man was able to commit six attempted rapes (“misdemeanors”) before he was apprehended mid-seventh. I like to imagine those cops reporting back to Olivia Benson.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/12/unprocessed_rape_kits_cost_concerns_can_t_explain_the_400_000_kit_backlog.html
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