RAINN Calls on Congress to End Untested Rape Kit Backlog

How many untested rape kits are there across the country? I don't know. The fact is, nobody does, because we don't bother tracking these vital pieces of evidence and don't test them in a timely manner.

RAINN (Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network) has launched a petition on Change.org in support of the SAFER Act, a bill that would speed up the elimination of the backlog and establish procedures to keep it from development again in the future. This SAFER Act follows upon another piece of groundbreaking legislation RAINN supported, the Debbie Smith Act, which provided funding to test these kits (so the current bill is no cost) that hold DNA evidence from the victims in rape cases.

"The evidence shows more and more that rapists are serial criminals," Scott Berkowitz, founder and president of RAINN, told Change.org in an interview. "So by leaving evidence untested, and leaving them on the threats, we're not only denying justice to the survivor in that first case, but we're threatening the lives of potentially more victims down the road." That's an alarming thought -- one that demands immediate action by Congress.

What's even more shocking? "The remarkable thing is that when you test a rape kit for a case in which there's no suspect, and run that DNA profile against the FBI's DNA database, in many states there getting a hit 4 times out of 10, sometimes even 5 times out of ten, so it's really an unbelievably powerful tool -- if we use it," Berkowitz went on. That's right: In almost 50% of the cases, simply testing the rape kit can turn up a match.

Fifty percent of cases with no suspect could be solved, bringing solace to the survivor and justice to the perpetrator. The funding is there now, and most of the rape kits in labs there were awaiting testing have been cleared out, but there's an unknown number of kits still sitting in police store rooms. The SAFER Act would also fix the potential of future rape kit backlog problems in three ways: increasing transparency, improving efficiency, and implementing tracking -- because if we can track packages via FedEx, an example RAINN provided, we should at least be able to keep tabs on vital pieces of DNA evidence in serious crimes.

"And that's sort of the crazy thing about this whole issue," Berkowitz continued, "is that we're talking about cases where they've already collected the evidence, so to have the evidence just sitting around and not bother testing it, not bother seeing if it matches a known criminal, is just baffling."

Wrap up Change.org's Sexual Assault Action Week by taking action with RAINN to ask Congress to stop rapists by ending rape kit backlogs.

Keep up-to-date with the Change.org SAAM campaign and opportunities for you to take action on our Women's Rights homepage and blog, on Twitter @changewomen or #saamchange, and on our Facebook page.

Photo credit: ynse