WUNRN
USA – The Trauma of Rape – The Tragedy of Untested Rape Kits – Lost Prosecutions
Nobody knows how many thousands of rape kits remain
untested across the country. Credit Ted Soqui/Corbis
May 9, 2015 – By Nicholas Kristof, NY Times
ROBBINS, Ill. — NATASHA, 14, had just gotten off the school bus after
ninth-grade basketball practice one evening and was walking home on a quiet
street beside a creek. When she heard footsteps behind her, she thought it was
one of her classmates.
Instead, it was a man who grabbed her and threw her over a fence into a
wooded area beside the creek. He beat her, stripped her and raped her, she
says, and then dragged her into the creek and plunged her head under the water.
A couple of times, he pulled her head up to see if she was still breathing.
So she says that the next time she pretended to be dead. He kicked her body
further into the stream and then left.
Natasha says she waited and, when she was sure he had gone, waded back to
shore and ran home. Her family rushed her to the hospital, where she endured
hours of humiliating scrutiny as nurses collected a rape kit: DNA, hairs,
fibers, anything that could be found on her body. The police took a statement
from Natasha and picked up the rape kit from the hospital.
Then they did nothing. For years.
That was 1991. The Police Department here in Robbins, a struggling,
low-income suburb of 5,000 people just south of Chicago, allowed rape kits to
sit untested on the shelves. Officers don’t seem to have seriously investigated
the assault, and the rapist got away with his crime — even as Natasha was tormented
by it.
She dropped sports and mostly stayed at home, terrified. She never learned
to swim and still avoids water because of her trauma. She became a troublemaker
at school and struggled with her temper. Natasha says she has had trouble
trusting men ever since and never married.
Then a couple of years ago, after a series of scandals in the Robbins
Police Department, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office took over the evidence room
and found scores of rape kits just gathering dust. One of them was Natasha’s.
The sheriff’s office had it tested, and it returned with a DNA match on a
career criminal, Carl F., now 46, who had a long record of offenses. Another
rape kit in the same evidence room also returned a hit on Carl F., the
sheriff’s office says.
Many Americans bristle at accusations that there is a “rape culture” that
sometimes tolerates sexual assault. Put aside the issue of terminology:
Whatever you call it, there is no doubt that we have often been lackadaisical
about addressing sexual assault. The injustice of rape is compounded by the injustice of official indifference. The
result is impunity for rapists, more rape, and more traumatic burdens for women
like Natasha — and for men, since men, too, are raped.
Only five states — Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Texas — require
the testing of all rape kits, according to the
Joyful Heart Foundation, which advocates universal testing. Nobody has any idea how many thousands of rape kits remain
untested in police stations, partly because there is no national
audit of them. Detroit found 11,341 untested kits in police
storage. Memphis found 12,164. Milwaukee had 2,655. Tulsa, Okla., 3,783. In Seattle, one of the most progressive cities in
the country, of the 1,641 rape kits collected between 2004 and 2014, only 22
percent were sent to a lab for testing.
“Primarily it’s raging incompetence that we find too often in police
departments that we go into,” said Tom Dart, the Cook County sheriff, who has found untested
rape kits in other towns besides Robbins. “It’s a combination of raging
incompetence and just not caring.”
(Dart says that Robbins once hired a police officer who supposedly had
worked in the Los Angeles Police Department. His evidence of previous
employment was a photocopy of an L.A.P.D. badge — and only after he was hired did someone look closely and
see that it was just a printout of Sgt. Joe Friday’s badge from the television
show “Dragnet.”)
I’ve written a good deal about educational inequality in America, with affluent
communities offering a first-rate education and poorer ones providing failing
schools. We also have profound law enforcement inequality: In poor
jurisdictions, public security often fails in ways that leave survivors scarred
forever.
“I was a mess,” says Rosa Pickett, who at 17 suffered a particularly brutal
rape in Robbins that was never seriously investigated, nor the rape kit tested.
She says she self-medicated and became addicted to crack cocaine for eight
years, shaking off the addiction only when she was imprisoned for theft. Now,
at 54, her life is in order again, but decades were lost that she attributes to
the rape.
Sheriff Dart says he sees that all the time. “It’s horrible,” he says.
“There are two sets of justice, one for affluent areas and one for nonaffluent
ones.”
Rape kits for middle-class women sometimes aren’t tested as well, and, for
a time, some women were charged to have their rape kits collected.
But activists say that the rape-kit backlog disproportionately affects
low-income communities with fewer resources, often those with large minority
populations. Robbins, for example, is overwhelmingly African-American (that
includes its police force), and Natasha is African-American. And rape victims
are often from marginalized groups, such as the poor, homeless, transgendered
or sex workers.
There are now signs of action on kit testing. Bravo to Vice President Joe Biden for championing
the issue along with Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat
of Maryland; the U.S. government has made available funds to help pay for
whittling through the backlog. And bravo to the Manhattan district attorney’s
office for directing funds to provide grants for other localities trying to clear their
backlogs. Some 20 states are moving forward on legislation to count
untested rape kits, or, in some cases, to do more testing to tackle the
backlog.
Rape is a global scourge: A United Nations survey found
that nearly a quarter of men in six Asian and Pacific countries admitted to
having raped a woman, and 37 percent of men surveyed in one South African
province said that they had raped. Whether in South Africa
or the United States, sexual assault thrives with impunity, and that’s one
reason we should routinely test rape kits, to chip away at the impunity and
raise the costs of rape so that it becomes less common.
“It’s a path to creating a more effective criminal justice system,” said
Sarah Haacke Byrd of the Joyful Heart Foundation.
After Cook County took over the evidence room in Robbins, Natasha’s case
was handled by Cara Smith of the sheriff’s office. A onetime competitive
swimmer, Smith says she was haunted by Natasha’s suffering and terror of water.
“I was consumed with the notion that had this violent assault occurred where I
grew up in Oak Park, or a few miles north in the City of Chicago, it would have
been solved,” Smith says.
Although Natasha’s kit drew a match, the statute of limitations had
expired, and Carl F. was never prosecuted. I tried to reach him to ask how he
explained the DNA matches — and to see if he remembered the alleged assault on
Natasha — but he doesn’t appear to have a fixed address, the authorities are
unaware of his location, and I couldn’t track him down.
As for Natasha, she is still living with the trauma of it all, including
the authorities’ reluctance to investigate. “It affects me to this day,” she
told me, crying softly. “It’s hard. It’s very hard.”