Here are a few highlights of their progress:

Robbins, Illinois

CBS Chicago reports that police in Robbins, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, recently discovered 51 rape kits that had never been sent for testing. Some of the kits dated as far back as 1986. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is now working to process this backlog because Robbins lacks the resources to do so.

According to the Robbins Police Department, they did not test the kits because the victims either recanted or declined to press charges. This is difficult to verify, however, because a flood in the basement of the Department destroyed the statements that would normally accompany the kits. That being the case, the Sheriff’s Office will process all 51 kits.

In a press conference, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said a rape kit examination “is incredibly difficult and traumatic for a woman to go through, and it’s rare someone would go through with it and not want to pursue a criminal case.” He added, “The victims should know they will have their cases heard, and they will be treated like they should have been treated. My goal is to bring justice to these folks.” Sheriff Dart’s office has been assisting Robbins with patrols and investigations in recent weeks, which led to the discovery of the untested kits.

As we reported previously, state officials made a similar discovery in Harvey, a neighboring suburb, in 2007. In a raid on the Harvey Police Department, officials uncovered 200 untested rape kits. In 2010, Illinois became the first state to pass legislation requiring the tracking and testing of all rape kits.

Houston, Texas

Houston’s Mayor Annise Parker has announced the city’s plan to eliminate its backlog of more than 6,600 untested rape kits within 14 months. The Houston Chronicle reports that it will cost Houston $4.4 million to outsource the kits to two private labs for testing. Funding will come from $2.2 million in federal grants and $2.2 million in the city’s current budget.

While it typically costs approximately $1,200 to outsource just one rape kit, the labs have offered a price of $400 per kit given the large volume of kits they will receive. With the backlogged kits, the city will also send 1,450 kits from active rape cases, 1,020 DNA samples from other crimes and an estimated 1,000 rape kits that will be collected over the next year, for a total of 10,130.

Texas was the second state to require that law enforcement agencies test every rape kit booked into evidence. Houston, which received a National Institute of Justice action-research grant, along with Detroit, to study the causes of its backlog, has its own policy of testing every kit. This policy came about because of the ability of rape kit evidence to link perpetrators to other crimes and to honor survivors’ courageous decision to undergo a rape kit exam and report the crime.

Ohio

Law enforcement agencies from across the state of Ohio recently sent more than 2,300 untested rape kits to a state crime lab for analysis. Almost half of the untested kits came from the Cleveland Police. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, when all of the recently submitted kits are tested, law enforcement could have an estimated 850 cases resulting from DNA database matches.

While Ohio has not passed legislation requiring the testing of all rape kits, in late 2011, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine adopted a policy encouraging all law enforcement agencies to clear their backlogs. His office hired additional crime lab staff to handle the influx of evidence.

Cleveland alone discovered that it had more than 3,700 untested kits dating as far back as 1991. To date, the city has submitted 1,073 kits to the lab. The Toledo Police Department has sent 215 kits, and Akron has sent more than 300 kits, dating as far back as 1994. The crime lab is testing up to 100 kits per month, starting with the oldest first.

Of the kits tested so far, 103 contained useable DNA evidence, and 65 matched to DNA profiles in CODIS. Thirty-six of the cases with matches originated in Cleveland, and those matches have confirmed the identity of 11 suspects, identified potential suspects in 21 cases and identified a possible serial rapist.

Police officials in Cleveland, as well as Toledo and Akron, have expressed their commitment to following up on and investigating the leads that result from clearing their backlogs. Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath plans to add two more detectives to the Sex Crimes & Child Abuse unit and seek assistance from the FBI, if necessary. He said, “I wouldn’t send these kits if I wasn’t going to follow up on them.” Deputy Chief Ed Tomba added that their primary concern is locating survivors and responding to the varied reactions they will have upon learning of new leads in their cases.

If passed by the rest of the Colorado General Assembly, the law would also mandate that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation propose a plan for analyzing all submitted rape kits by June 30, 2014. Going forward, the law would require rape kits to be submitted for testing within 21 days of receipt by a law enforcement agency.

State Rep. Frank McNulty introduced the bill in response to an ABC CALL7 investigative report uncovering hundreds of untested rape kits in the greater Denver area. In a guest commentary for the Colorado Observer, Rep. McNulty explained his concern after seeing the report:

It takes very real courage to come forward to report a sexual assault and even greater courage to go through the trauma of evidence being collected. These women subjected themselves to the trauma of evidence collection so that their attacker would be brought to justice and so that other women wouldn’t become victims of their attacker. If rape kits are not tested so that the evidence can be loaded into state and national databases, the opportunity to provide justice for other women who have been assaulted by these same predators is dismissed.

He also made the case for testing every rape kit booked into police evidence:

Some maintain that not every kit submitted needs to be tested. While I understand this from the perspective of allocating financial resources, I simply don’t agree. We should be thorough in testing submitted rape kits and respecting the women who were assaulted. Troubling is the fact that, in one case, only 26 percent of the rape kits that were collected were tested – leaving 74 percent untested. In my opinion, that isn’t right. That agency has since changed its policy and is testing more evidence collected. We need other agencies to do the same.

The Call 7 report that inspired Rep. McNulty to introduce HB 1020 included an interview with a survivor whose rape kit was never tested. She asked:

 “Is it an unrealistic expectation that all evidence be considered and that the investigative process be complete?”

She also bravely testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of HB 1020, pointing out to lawmakers that testing all rape kits, regardless of the type of crime, can help to identify serial rapists.

If this bill becomes law, Colorado will be the third state—behind Illinois and Texas—to require the testing of all rape kits. We are eager to share updates as HB 1020 progresses through the state legislature.

In 2011, the Texas state legislature passed a bill requiring law enforcement agencies to count the untested kits in their evidence rooms and report their numbers to DPS. Despite an October 2011 deadline, few agencies complied with the reporting requirement.

To date, approximately 130 of more than 2,600 police agencies have submitted their backlog numbers, including many of the biggest agencies. Among the reporting agencies, there are 15,900 untested rape kits. Based on that number, DPS estimates there to be roughly 20,000 untested kits statewide.

To clear a backlog of that size, DPS believes it will cost between $7 million and $11 million. When the state legislature meets for its 2013 session, it will discuss how to pay for testing. State officials are hopeful that the U.S. Congress will pass the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (SAFER) Act, which would create a national registry for rape kit evidence and amend current law to require a greater percentage of Debbie Smith Act grant funds be spent directly on analyzing untested DNA evidence. The U.S. Senate passed the SAFER Act on New Year’s Eve, but it failed to pass the House and will be re-introduced in the new session.

Some Texas law enforcement agencies are already seeing results from their efforts to clear the backlog. In Houston, where fees collected from strip-club patrons help to fund the processing of untested rape kits, testing led to the arrest of a man for a rape that occurred ten years ago.

These kits are part of an initial wave of 200 kits that have been sent for testing under the National Institute of Justice’s grant to address Detroit’s backlog of over 11,000 untested rape kits. The DNA evidence in these 21 cases matched to the DNA profiles of suspected offenders involved in at least one other rape case, according to ClickOn Detroit. In some cases, the evidence matched to the DNA in up to five other cases, according to the article.

Testing a rape kit can identify a potential assailant, confirm a suspect’s contact with a victim, corroborate the victim’s account of the sexual assault and exonerate innocent defendants. And of course, testing rape kits can connect suspects to other crimes.

In addition to identifying the possible serial rapists, the DNA evidence in the batch of 153 kits has yielded another 38 DNA matches in the database, according to The Daily Beast. All of the cases now need to be investigated, says Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy in the article.

“People think when you get a CODIS hit, we can just go out and arrest that person,” she says in the article. “But a DNA hit is never the whole case. We have to go find the witnesses, do the old-fashioned kind of investigation. They’re cold cases—they’ve just been sitting there. We have to reinvestigate all these cases.”

“I say ‘reinvestigate,’ but some were never investigated properly, frankly,” Prosecutor Worthy adds.

We are happy to share with you that we have raised more than $5,500 through our GlobalGiving project to continue our work to end the backlog of untested rape kits and bring healing and justice to survivors of sexual assault.

We know that rape kit reform takes time—truly lasting change in the way our criminal justice system and we as a community respond to sexual violence will not come overnight. In our last GlobalGiving report, we gave you an introduction to our work in Detroit to end the city’s backlog of nearly 11,000 untested rape kits and support our collaborative partners through our Heal the Healers program.

Our commitment to end Detroit’s backlog of untested rape kits extends beyond supporting the wellness of police, social workers and prosecutors and today, we’d like to share another brief snapshot of what your funding is making possible.

Research on Victim Notification and the Rape Kit Backlog

With the goal of engaging and empowering survivors in the criminal justice system during rape kit reform, we are conducting critical research on victim notification, which is the process of being in contact with and updating survivors on the status of their rape kit evidence. Our research is not just informing our work in Detroit, but will also aid jurisdictions across the country that are working to end their own backlogs.

We have seen that when jurisdictions end their backlogs, arrest rates double and more perpetrators are convicted. Survivors experience healing and justice, perpetrators are held accountable and sexual violence is prevented.

Once a rape kit is turned over to police custody, the survivor generally does not have a legal right to be informed of the status of this evidence. Police are not obligated to share whether the kit is sitting in a storage facility or in line to be tested, or whether the evidence contained in it has linked to a perpetrator. It may be years—if at all—before a survivor hears from law enforcement about the rape kit, particularly in jurisdictions with very large rape kit backlogs.

Part of our role in Detroit is to help discover, navigate and implement best practices for conducting victim notification. For the past several months, Joyful Heart’s team has been conducting research on victim notification practices and procedures throughout the country that can serve as a model for Detroit as kits from thousands of survivors are tested.

There is very little written on the topic of victim notification, especially as it relates to a rape kit backlog. The significance of this research therefore has the potential to be great. With dozens of primary documents collected from agencies across the country and over 50 interviews with police officers, advocates, prosecutors, government officials, trauma experts and survivors—and many more still to come—we plan to share the findings of this research within the year. Our goal is for the results to serve as a resource—the first of its kind—to Detroit and jurisdictions across the country working to enact victim-centered rape kit reform.

“There are times [when] it feels very old, and there are times when it feels like it happened yesterday. If I could know that the kit was available and could be tested even 25 years later, and the DNA could be identified as belonging to a certain person or persons, I would be able to have that information [for] the rest of my life.”

“I have visions of my kit sitting on a shelf, of those police officers tearing up my report. That has an effect. I would want to know if the kit was tested, resources were used and someone did what they were supposed to. In some small way, it mattered.”

– Survivors who have never been notified about the status of their rape kits

Your donations are making it possible for us to conduct this research and create lasting rape kit reform—step by step, community by community. We thank you for continuing to stand with us in making a difference in the way we respond to sexual violence in the United States.

To make a donation and learn more about our GlobalGiving project, click here.

The Plain Dealer reports that, “at least a third of reported sex offenses, including many involving children, have been classified by the police department as non-crimes with labels such as ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘departmental information.’”

The investigation began after police reported that a total of 26 sexual assaults were reported in the city over a three year period. Reporters questioned the statistics and eventually, the city produced 88 cases that had been reported in the years between 2008 and 2010. Many of the cases has been classified as unfounded, closed without changes or not labeled as rape or sexual offenses.

The Plain Dealer also found that the city under-reported the number of “forcible rapes” to the FBI as well. Though the FBI’s definition is currently more narrow than the state law’s definition of sexual assault, almost two dozen cases should have been counted. Only three were reported from 2008 to 2010.

Despite having an new policy on how evidence, including evidence from rape kits, is collected, stored and tested, the department doesn’t have a written policy on how sexual assault cases should be investigated. Another recent article in The Plain Dealer also describes how most departments in Cuyahoga County, where the cities of Cleveland and Cleveland Heights are located, do not have specific policies detailing how to handle sexual assaults.

“It is the responsibility of police to define and classify these crimes properly, and to report the numbers accurately,” Cleveland Rape Crisis Center President & CEO Megan O’Bryan said. “Victims will continue to be silenced if their reports are not taken seriously, investigated thoroughly, and correctly reflected in crime statistics,” O’Bryan said. “We regularly hear stories, in the media and within the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, of sex crime reports not being taken seriously, victims not wanting to ‘cooperate’ with police investigations, and investigations gone awry due to lack of understanding of sexual assault, guidelines and policies,” O’Bryan said. “A stand-alone sexual assault policy is a step on a really steep ladder to changing this climate for rape victims, but a step in the right direction.”

Read more of our coverage of Ohio’s response to sexual assault here on the Backlog Blog.

Governor Brown explained his decision to veto the bill:

“I don’t see why we would mandate counties to participate in a program they don’t want, especially when the state is cutting back on so many programs that are needed and wanted. Local officials are in the best position to determine whether to participate in such a program.”

Due to budgetary constraints, the scope of the bill had narrowed considerably since its introduction by Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena. Initially, AB 322 required jurisdictions to track and test all rape kits, but the version Governor Brown ultimately reviewed required only the ten counties with the lowest sexual assault arrest rates to eliminate their backlogs.

So far, the department has tested about 300 of the kits, which have already yielded 12 DNA matches to profiles in the national DNA databank, CODIS. The NOPD has already made two arrests and expects to make many more as a result of the testing the backlogged rape kits.

“There are going to be a lot of individuals who are going to be arrested for sexual assaults that they thought they got away with,” said New Orleans Police Commander Paul Noel.

The department is working with the Louisiana State Police and Marshall University in West Virginia, which are contributing time and resources needed to test the hundreds of kits.

Nola.com reports that the NOPD is also working through another backlog: cases involving rape kits that yield DNA matches that were never investigated. When Noel took over as commander of the sex crimes division in July 2010, there were 400 such matches that were never properly investigated because police had downgraded the classification of the sexual assaults in reports to classifications like “miscellaneous incidents.”

Since then, detectives have investigated 200 of these cases. Nola.com reports that they have arrested or put out warrants for the arrest of suspects in 73 cases and continue to work on the rest of the backlog, according to Noel.

“Requiring even one rape victim to wait an unreasonable amount of time for a sexual assault kit to be reviewed is unacceptable–both to the victim and to the people of New Orleans,” said Superintendent Ronal Serpas. “These kits are no longer sitting idle in storage. Progress is being made and suspects are being identified.”

Read our previous coverage on New Orleans’s backlog here on the Backlog Blog.

The only type of sexual assault on which the UCR currently collects data is “forcible rape,” defined as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” That definition excludes a number of crimes, including rapes where the victim was drugged or under the influence of alcohol, and all male victims of sexual assault.

Given the definition’s exceedingly narrow scope, many sexual assaults are not counted as rapes in yearly federal reports that are used to track crime rates in the United States. This under-reporting misleads the public about the prevalence of rape and results in fewer resources for both preventing future sexual violence and supporting survivors.

In mid-September, members of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), including representatives of police agencies from various cities, met with FBI officials and survivors’ advocates to discuss making the definition more inclusive. The proposed change must now go through an FBI working group later this month and an FBI advisory group in December.

Campaigning by advocates and consensus among local law enforcement agencies created the impetus to change the UCR definition. A recent PERF study reported that 80% of 306 responding police agencies believe the FBI definition is inadequate. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has spearheaded the effort within PERF. He testified about the under-reporting of rape before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs in September 2010.

We are hopeful that the FBI will take a big step toward bringing healing and justice to survivors of sexual violence and make this much-needed and long-awaited change to the UCR. Thank you to the advocates and law enforcement officials who have worked to make this change possible.

The victim submitted to a sexual assault evidence collection–or rape kit–exam in August of 1997 after reporting numerous instances of being sexual assaulted by her step-father, Robert Buchanan. Buchanan was questioned but never charged by the Harvey Police Department and went on to serve as a corrections officer in a local jail for over a decade.

This kit was one of 200 untested rape kits that the Cook County State’s Attorney office, the sheriff’s office and the Illinois State Police recovered in a 2007 raid, according to various news agencies, including NBC, CBS, ABC, the Chicago Tribune and The Huffington Post.

Under the 2010 Illinois Sexual Assault Evidence Submission Act, the first of two state-wide laws in the country that mandate law enforcement to track and test all rape kits, the Illinois State Police (ISP) was required to collect data on all untested rape kits throughout the state of Illinois. In March, 2011, the ISP released a report documenting 4,126 sexual assault cases in connection to untested rape kits in the state of Illinois.

It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits across the country.

As for the 200 untested rape kits recovered from the Harvey Police Department, the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office began an investigation into these cases in 2007. Since it has begun, charges have been brought against 14 defendants in 20 separate cases, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said.

“The victims of these sexual assaults were denied justice when their attacks occurred but we have not forgotten about them,” she said.

We applaud those branches of the Illinois government that have taken action to bring healing and justice that survivors of sexual assault deserve. It should have been delivered years ago.