The Databank currently captures offender DNA profiles for only 46% of crimes. Governor Cuomo has proposed expanding the Databank to include samples from offenders convicted of all felonies and all penal law misdemeanors. The Senate passed the proposal in January with overwhelming bipartisan support, but it is now stalled in the Assembly.

Expanding the Databank will solve and prevent crimes. It will allow more survivors of violent crimes to see their perpetrators brought to justice. Listen to the powerful story of Ann M., whose twelve-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted in their home. DNA evidence eventually led to the conviction of the attacker, but not until a decade later—when petit larceny became a qualifying offense for DNA collection.

Like Ann, too many survivors and their families wait years for justice and the healing it can bring. While they wait, their perpetrators remain free to commit other violent crimes.

For too many years, efforts to expand the State’s DNA Databank have failed. Please visit our Advocacy Center to tell your New York Assembly Member that it is time to make New York safe—for you, your family and your community.

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.

VAWA has fostered coordinated responses to violence against women by bringing together the criminal justice system, social services agencies and private nonprofits that work with survivors. It is responsible for the creation of legal assistance programs for survivors and greater protections for immigrants experiencing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault or stalking. If passed, the reauthorization will provide for enhanced criminal justice responses to sexual assault, greater prevention of domestic violence homicides and engagement of young people in stopping dating violence before it starts.

Please take action today to ensure that Congress reauthorizes VAWA. Write or call your senators and urge them to become co-sponsors of this vital piece of legislation. You can send the message we drafted or write a letter in your own words, expressing how critical VAWA is in the movement to end violence against women and girls. Calling your senators’ offices will guarantee that your message is heard. Visit our Advocacy Center for contact information and talking points for your letters and/or calls to your senators.

Thank you for your commitment to bringing healing and justice to survivors.

Every year, tens of thousands of individuals report a sexual assault to the police. After an assault, a survivor undergoes an invasive exam that lasts between four and six hours to collect DNA and forensic evidence, which then goes into a “rape kit.”

The federal government estimates that over 200,000 untested kits are currently sitting untouched in storage facilities nationwide. Each untested kit represents a missed opportunity for healing and justice for a survivor. Eliminating the backlog would send a powerful message to survivors that their cases matter and that the criminal justice system has not forgotten them.

Joyful Heart would use the $1 million award to continue and enhance its efforts to end the rape kit backlog in cities across the country. We plan to create replicable victim-centered best practices, which will foster trusting and open relationships between survivors and responders; to completely overhaul endthebacklog.org, the only site dedicated to raising awareness about the backlog; to deepen our partnership with the City of Detroit and other jurisdictions across the U.S. to help end local backlogs; and to use additional funds to test backlogged kits that might otherwise go untested.

Please take a moment to vote for Joyful Heart. $1 million would go a long way in helping us to bring healing and justice to survivors of sexual violence.  To learn more, please visit www.joyfulheartfoundation.org/chase.

You can read more of Linda’s pieces and interviews here on the Backlog Blog.

As most events do, ours had a theme, How Will You Join? (The Joyful Revolution). In 2009, at Joyful Heart’s second Gala, the Joyful Revolution was born: a movement of our collective vision for a community that collaboratively ends the cycle of violence and abuse by turning toward the issues of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. At last year’s Gala, the Revolution Continued as we honored the 15^th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which changed the way violent crimes against women are prosecuted and prevented.

At this year’s Gala, we asked the question How Will You Join? And it was answered in amazing ways throughout the night.

Letters urging leadership on rape kit reform

We started off with a letter writing campaign to members of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. Each letter asked for their leadership to work to end the rape kit backlog. By the end of the evening, over 400 letters were signed—almost one for each guest in attendance. They’ll arrive by mail this week to the offices of Vice President Biden, Attorney General Holder, the Chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees—Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Lamar Smith, respectively—and dozens of individual representatives with our message that we support comprehensive, compassionate and victim-centered rape kit reform from the federal government.

By the end of the evening, 409 letters were signed

The literal centerpiece of much of the evening in the area where this letter writing campaign took place was a huge installation—300 rape kits shaped like a heart. It represented the backlog of untested rape kits and our hope and commitment that one day, it won’t be there.

The 9-foot tall heart-shaped structure that was created out of 300 (empty and unused) rape kits

It was quite large, but it was the enormity of its message that was most striking. Seeing 300 kits before them, guests grappled with the enormity of the backlog–experts estimate hundreds of thousands are in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the country.

As we moved to the next part of the evening, guests were drawn to the stage and dining area by the cacophony of an 8-member drum troop. Each guest had a musical shaker—another way to make noise and join in that night. Eventually we all settled down and news anchor Brian Williams, a devoted friend of Joyful Heart’s founder and president Mariska Hargitay started the evening’s program, a large portion of which was devoted to celebrating the evening’s revolutionary honoree, Dr. Neal Baer.

Dr. Baer is the prolific and visionary executive producer of Law & Order: SVU of 11 years, friend of Mariska for even longer and a founding board member of Joyful Heart. We honored his long career with SVU, his unmatched ability to tell the stories of survivors with compassion and hope and, of course, the result of this work that has shed light into the darkness that surrounds sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. As Mariska noted in her introduction of Dr. Baer:

When SVU started airing, survivors from across the country began writing to me, disclosing their stories of rape, assault, and abuse. In Detective Olivia Benson they heard an advocate—literally a person calling out on their behalf. And yes, Olivia’s heart is mine, but her words were Neal’s. So many survivors’ journeys of healing have their beginning with you sitting at your desk, writing.

Mariska Hargitay and Dr. Neal Baer at the 2011 Gala

At last year’s Gala, Neal listened as a woman named Helena told her story about her rape kit that had been stuck in Los Angeles’s backlog for over a decade. She had lived in fear that her rapist was still on the streets, able to find her using the driver’s license he had taken during her assault. When her kit was eventually tested, the evidence linked to a serial rapist.

As she told her story, Dr. Baer took notes on his dinner napkin. These notes would become the storyline to SVU Season 12, Episode 3, “Behave” based on Helena’s story, which guest starred Jennifer Love Hewitt and aired September 28, 2010 in over 15 million homes, launching a national dialogue on the backlog of untested rape kits.

Though very few of us are TV producers, it was clear that there are countless ways people can–and have–joined the revolution. As part of the program, person after person, 35 in total, got on stage to share the ways they turned toward the issues of violence and abuse, shed light into the darkness surrounding them, survived themselves or helped someone else survive.

“I talked to my sons about respect.”
“I reported my neighbor to the police after hearing him beat his wife and kids.”
“I asked a co-worker if she felt safe in her home. And then I asked her again.”
“I broke the cycle of abuse in my family.”
“I reported my rape.”
“I had the crazy idea to start a foundation.”

Mariska with all those who shared how they joined the revolution

Of course, no post about our How Will You Join? themed gala would be complete without asking you how you have joined. How have you turned toward these issues, made a change in your community, in your home or in your heart?

I know that by reading this, you already have. And maybe you’ve heard about one of the easier ways to join—voting for Joyful Heart in Chase Community Giving. It’s a simple action you can take right from your Facebook page, but one that would help us win thousands of dollars to go toward our efforts to end the rape kit backlog. This opportunity is taking place on the Chase Community Giving application on Facebook allows people to vote for organizations and ideas that make a difference. We made it through the first round of voting and now we’re in it to win $500,000. With this funding, we would:

• Expand endthebacklog.org, the only site dedicated to raising public awareness about this issue;
• Publish the first-ever detailed account of how one city, LA, responded to its backlog;
• Partner with Detroit to help end their backlog of 10,000+ rape kits; and
• Create victim-centered best practices that can be implemented nationwide

But we need your help. 2 steps–less than two minutes—is all it takes to join our Revolution in a big way.

1. VISIT www.fb.com/ChaseCommunityGiving and click Like
2. BROWSE to www.tinyurl.com/votejoy. VOTE for Joyful Heart by giving access to the Chase Community Giving application and clicking the VOTE NOW button.

We’re so grateful for your support.

A new document produced and distributed by the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence outlines some other costs of sexual violence. The document addresses the economic, health care and systems costs associated with sexual violence. It notes that:

• Each rape costs approximately $151,423;
• In 2008, violence and abuse constituted up to 37.5% of all health care costs, or up to $750 billion total;
• Rape is the most costly of all crimes to its victims, with total estimated costs at $127 billion a year (excluding the cost of child sexual abuse);
• Sexual abuse interferes with women’s ability to work.

While these figures are dispiriting, there are ways to mitigate these costs and other consequences of sexual violence. The article goes on to state:

“A 2006 study found that when victims receive advocate-assisted services following assaults, they receive more helpful information, referrals, and services and experience less secondary trauma or re-victimization by medical and legal systems (Campbell, 2006). Furthermore, the same study found that when advocates are present in the legal and medical proceedings following rape, victims fare better in both the short- and long-term, experiencing less psychological distress, physical health struggles, sexual risk-taking behaviors, self-blame, guilt and depression.”

At Joyful Heart, we know that how a community responds to survivors is crucial to healing. The initial response can support a survivor on her path to recovery or decrease his feelings and of isolation and hopelessness. Sexual assault advocacy services support survivors in reclaiming a positive sense of self, pursuing the justice that makes us all safer and rediscovering the world and their own bodies as caring and loving places. These services are also cost effective, as they can prevent complex, long-term health problems and they also contribute to increased prosecution rates.

This report reminds us that sexual violence costs us all. We are affected in a number of ways–as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities–but supportive interventions can mitigate the devastating consequences of violence. We all have a role to play in constructing and supporting such interventions by donating to our local rape crisis center, supporting policies and funding that make services available or just being a compassionate friend, family member or colleague.

Please find the entire document with citations here. For a list of crisis and support centers throughout the United States, visit the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

]]> http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=605 3 http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=513 http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=513#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:06:20 +0000 Lendon http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=513

Our efforts to end the backlog of untested rape kits, the collection of evidence from victims’ bodies that wait to be tested in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the country, are part of a larger movement to change the response to sexual violence in the United States–one that recognizes the importance of justice and healing and one that demonstrates to survivors that each and every one of their experiences and cases is important.

April 1 marked the beginning of Sexual Assault Awareness Month (#SAAM for our Twitter followers). You can read a message from Joyful Heart’s Executive Director, Maile Zambuto, on the Joyful Heart Blog here and read more about it it on our website.

At the beginning of every week here on the Backlog Blog, we are going to be sharing with you some statistics about the nature of sexual violence and the response to sexual violence. We start today with some commonly cited numbers many of you might already have seen.

• Every 2 minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States. That’s 248,700 victims in a year. (Source: RAINN)
• Only 30% of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police (Source: RAINN). Even so, that means somebody reports a forcible rape every 6 minutes in this country (Source: FBI).
• The majority (73%) of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victims knows or is acquainted with. 40% of sexual assaults take place in the home. (Source: RAINN)

Please share with your community and loved ones and check back here next week for more numbers and some indicators of the response to sexual violence.

Whether they are just embarking on their journalistic pursuits or they are award-winning veterans in the field, journalists are crucial to our efforts to end the backlog. Because only one state (Illinois) requires jurisdictions to track their rape kits at the moment, a lot of investigative work must, and has, been done by the media to uncover the nature of backlogs. One of the most important steps in creating a movement–a revolution, even–is raising awareness. Writing articles is a great way to do this, and there are so many resources that can help.

Brittany was kind enough to send along her completed article published in The Pitchfork’s February 18 issue for us to post here on our blog. We thought we’d share it with you.

Can you describe what happened? Did you get a good look? Could you give us a description? These are the hounding questions asked when one is sexually assaulted. There’s no time to think or process–just questions. And on top of the questions, there’s the evidence collection, a long process in which evidence is collected directly from the crime scene. But in cases of sexual assault, the victim is the crime scene. We see things like this every day on television, but the part most of us don’t realize is that this stuff really happens.

Every year, tens of thousands of people are sexually assaulted or raped. In 2009, there were 88,097 reported rapes in the US, nearly double the number in South Africa, where the second highest number of rapes occur annually. Some frightening statistics: one in six women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime; every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted; only an estimated 6% of rapists will ever spend a day in prison; rape has a 24% arrest rate, on average. Fortunately, victims are able to undergo an sexual assault evidence (SAE) examination in order to identify and prosecute their attacker, that is, if their evidence is tested.

During an SAE examination, commonly referred to as a “rape kit exam” the victim is in a room with the examiner for approximately four to six hours. During this time, to collect possible DNA evidence, the examiner swabs the victim and scrapes under the fingernails, pulls hairs and fibers, collects the victim’s clothes, collects blood and urine samples, and takes pictures of any visible wounds. Often times this process is emotionally difficult for the victim to endure, but he/she gets through it because he/she knows it could possibly help law enforcement make a conviction. The only problem is that a large proportion of these rape kits are never tested.

Currently in the U.S., there are an estimated 180,000 to 400,000 untested rape kits sitting on the shelves of police evidence labs across the country, forgotten. In most states, there is a statute of limitations for rape, meaning there’s only a certain time frame in which someone can be brought to trial for a specific crime. If a rape kit is not processed in that allotted time frame, the evidence is useless. The rape kit backlog, as it is commonly known, is an epidemic in our country and needs to end.

The Joyful Heart Foundation (JHF), a non-profit organization whose purpose is to shed light on issues like sexual assault, child abuse and domestic violence, is working with various sources to try to end the backlog in the U.S. Mariska Hargitay of NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), founder of JHF, testified in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security to try to make a stand. This was the first time the House has ever held a hearing specifically about this issue. Hargitay said, “These kits represent human beings who have suffered greatly. Testing their rape kits sends victims the fundamental and crucial message that they and their cases matter. Not testing them sends the opposite message.” Although not much was done by the House due to chaos with other bills such as health care and taxes, Hargitay, Neal Baer (Executive Producer, SVU), NBC, RAINN, Human Rights Watch, state coalitions against sexual assault, Family Violence Prevention Fund, and various experts have joined to end the rape kit backlog and are hoping to make some changes this year in the new congressional session.

JHF Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships, Sarah Tofte, said there’s no way to really know the exact number of untested rape kits in the U.S. because the only state required to track the number is Illinois, but most major jurisdictions have tens of thousands backlogged. She said it’s also difficult to estimate the total number of rapes that occur every year because the FBI is the only organization in charge of tracking them, and they have a very narrow definition of what qualifies something as “rape.” Throughout this movement, JHF and its partners have provided advocacy on state and federal levels to attain comprehensive rape kit reform and are working with the city of Detroit to end the backlog there. Tofte also said, “Rape kit testing can have such a big impact and move a case forward and it sends a message to the perpetrator that they can’t get away with it.” With all the effort being put forth toward this issue, within the next year or two, there will hopefully be substantial progress and the problem will come to an end.

We continue to be impressed by the work young people are doing around the country to bring attention to the backlog. We want to know about your efforts. Please email us at blog@joyfulheartfoundation.org.

Ella and others at the Kentucky Youth Assembly, where they presented mock legislation to eliminate the state's rape kit backlog.

In 2010, the Joyful Heart Foundation‘s second issue of Reunion featured a story of a young girl whose big voice is matched only by her bigger heart. Ella Burnside was given an assignment from her English teacher: write about something in the world you want to change, and then do it. Ella wrote about ending sexual violence and domestic abuse, and then went about raising over $10,000 for Joyful Heart. She was in tenth grade.

This school year, Ella attended a youth government conference in her home state of Kentucky. There, she and several of her classmates presented a bill to the mock legislature calling for the elimination of Kentucky’s backlog of untested rape kits and proposing a timeline to get the kits tested. Several news sources, including CBS and WLKY, have reported on the state crime lab’s backlog of hundreds of kits.

As Ella reported to us, her bill sailed through the mock House and Senate, with approximately 95% of her peers voting for it. “I am confident that they truly understood the importance of eliminating KY’s backlog and that many of them were immensely disturbed by the situation,” Ella told us. “While this was not actually presented to our state government, it was really neat to see that once people hear and understand this problem, most of them are ready to take action to reverse the situation. Hopefully the legislators in my state will react in the same way when they become aware of our backlog.”

At the end of the conference, the bill was ultimately vetoed by the conference’s student governor due to budget constraints, an outcome not unfamiliar to those working to reform rape kit testing across the country. In 2009, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill, AB1017, which would have made his the first state in the nation to collect comprehensive data on the physical evidence collected from rape victims that is sitting in police storage facilities, citing resource constraints. You can read the Huffington Post article that Sarah Tofte, Joyful Heart’s Director of Advocacy & Strategic Partnerships, wrote on his decision here.

Ella’s thoughtful work — and the response of the fellow student leaders in Kentucky — is encouraging news. If you or someone you know is doing something to raise awareness of the rape kit backlog or to contribute to the movement to end sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, we want to know about it!  Send an email to blog@joyfulheartfoundation.org.