In August 2009, an assistant prosecutor in Detroit discovered more than 11,000 sexual assault kits warehoused in a city police storage unit. A preliminary investigation suggested that most of the kits — filled with DNA evidence taken from invasive physical examinations of victims — had never been tested, and some had been gathering dust for three decades.
The Wayne County prosecutor's office brought in Rebecca Campbell, PhD, a community psychologist at Michigan State University, to lead a multidisciplinary task force to assess the scope of the problem, figure out why the kits had never been tested, and develop a plan to test them and notify victims of the results.
In a reportopens in new window released last year, Campbell and her colleagues found that 8,717 of the 11,219 kits had never been submitted for forensic testing. That was partly due to lack of resources and budget, but it was also due to entrenched biases against sexual assault victims, particularly young women, victims of so-called "date rape" and victims that the police believed were prostitutes. The team then tested more than 1,500 of the kits, and found that more than one-quarter yielded DNA that matched offenders in the FBI's national offender database.
Based on that finding, Detroit decided to test all of the kits. Last October, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy told the media that 2,616 of the kit samples matched to offenders in the FBI database. Among the matches were 549 suspected serial rapists.
Campbell is now consulting with other cities as they deal with similar backlogs of untested rape kits. She spoke to the Monitor about this work.
Were you surprised by what you ultimately found in Detroit?
No. I think the national discussion about the problem of untested rape kits has focused a lot on the fact that there have not been enough financial resources to test the kits. And we certainly found that Detroit, like many other cities, was under-resourced. That's absolutely part of the cause.
But it was by no means the only cause, and not even the major cause, in Detroit. When we read the police reports associated with the untested kits, we saw pervasive victim-blaming.
We did detailed content analyses of the police reports to understand how and why it was that police decided, "I'm not going to submit this kit." And we saw very negative attitudes toward victims, particularly toward adolescent victims and toward victims who were sexually assaulted by people they know.
And so when police didn't believe the victims, and they reframed what happened as "he said, she said," or thought that the victim might be engaged in prostitution, they thought, "Well, there's no point in testing it." And they just kept doing that, in case after case after case. And after 30 years, that's what accumulates — 8,700 untested rape kits.
What's the significance of all those untested kits, from a law-enforcement perspective?
I think it represents a lot of different things. It represents a missed opportunity in preventing a crime. It's a missed opportunity at holding perpetrators accountable. It's a really important investigative tool that they weren't utilizing. It was a really important source of evidence that prosecutors could have been using in court.
And finally, it could have been an incredibly important tool for survivors, to know that what had happened to them had happened to other women and men, and that police were trying to do something about it.
A rape evidence collection kit involves a very invasive exam. And a lot of these victims had gone through that exam because they were trying to prevent this from happening to somebody else. And when those kits weren't tested, it often did happen to somebody else, and to somebody else after that and to somebody else after that.
Part of your task was to develop a protocol for notifying those victims that their kits had been found, and would be tested, perhaps decades after the assault had occurred. How did they react?
We put a lot of time and thought into developing the victim notification protocol. It's very complicated. The legal community sees this as a critical moment in the case, in terms of re-contacting the victim and potentially doing another interview. Those of us in psychology and social work see it as a re-activation of someone's traumatic memory — opening up a very painful memory in someone's past without notice or warning.
So, we really needed a multidisciplinary team to make sure that the appropriate legal issues were being attended to, but also that the victims' emotional and physical health was also being attended to.
We had a two-day retreat of all of the disciplines — law enforcement, prosecution, forensic sciences, social work, psychology and victim advocacy — to talk about how to do this. Then all of the notifying staff went through extensive training on the neurobiology of trauma and what research tells us about how people react in traumatic situations, and what we can do as practitioners to try to mitigate that trauma.
Given that, when we went out and started doing the notifications, most victims had either a neutral response, which under the circumstance is probably a good thing, or some were very positive and were very happy that somebody had re-contacted them and that something was happening.
A small percentage did say, "No, I've moved on in my life, I don't want to do this anymore, please leave." And so the notifying staff did. We respected the victims' choice.
At this point, what is the status of the testing and the possible legal cases that could come out of the matches with the FBI database?
My understanding is that all of the kits have now been tested — after our study was finished, the prosecutor's office secured funding to test the rest of the kits — and that there are active investigations in all the cases that have a DNA identification match. It was beyond the scope of our project to follow the cases through into investigation and prosecution. But the [Wayne County] prosecutor has stated publicly her commitment to ensuring that all of the cases are investigated, and that all of the cases that are still eligible for prosecution will be reviewed for prosecution, and that as many cases as can go forward will go forward. It's a very long-term project. There are thousands of cases.
What about new sexual assault kits that come in? Has the procedure for dealing with them changed in Detroit?
Yes. Now, all rape kits in which a victim signs a release for the kit to be tested are automatically submitted for testing. That was a practice that was begun in Detroit in the middle of our research, when it became clear how useful these kits could be to the investigation, the prosecution and the victim's healing. And in June 2014, Michigan passed a law that requires all kits in the state, in which a victim has signed a release for testing, to be submitted for testing.
Have other cities discovered similar untested backlogs?
Yes. I've done trainings in several other cities that have large numbers of untested kits: Houston, Cleveland and Memphis are three notable examples. I'm working with a team at RTI International, as well as other colleagues around the country, to provide training and technical assistance to communities that were recently funded under a Bureau of Justice Assistance grants programopens in new window on this issue. That's presented an opportunity for us to take some lessons learned from Detroit and share them with other jurisdictions, and to learn from other jurisdictions about the challenges they're facing.
How big a problem is it? How many untested kits are out there nationwide?
Unfortunately, one of the key sticking points right now is that we do not have a national census. Kevin Strom and his colleagues at RTI International did a survey of law enforcement agencies back around 2010 that estimated that there's up to perhaps 200,000 untested rape kits. Since then, there have been various investigative reporting projects trying to count them city by city.
But we do not have a national number, and that would actually be fairly challenging to do. It took Detroit the better part of almost four months just to count the number of kits that they had, and to try to verify their testing status. The kits had to be counted manually [because there was no IT infrastructure in place to track them. And because they are legal evidence], they had to be counted by very specific people in very specific and tightly controlled situations.
What we do know from social science studies that have been done, and investigative reporting projects, is that this is not a regional problem and it is not limited to large urban districts. It is truly coast-to-coast and happens in small, medium and large cities.
What are you working on now?
As I mentioned, I'm working on the training and technical assistance grant for other cities, which is led by RTI International. My colleagues and I have also received funding from the National Institute of Justice to do a follow-up analysis of the DNA identification matches that come from the full number of kits that were finally tested in Detroit, with an eye toward identifying patterns of serial sexual assaults over time. We're trying to understand how many of these assaults occurred in the context of other crimes and how many of them were a part of a series of sexual assaults that were committed by an offender.
Have any new training or education programs for police officers been put into place in Detroit since your study began?
Absolutely. Now we have new laws and policies to address some of these problems and attitudes and myths.
We developed a comprehensive training program for law enforcement on the neurobiology of trauma and its implications for practitioners, which really was a way of addressing some of their underlying stereotypes and taking a very evidence-based approach to explaining why victims behave the way they do, and how to do trauma-informed interviewing.
And then my colleagues at the Michigan Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention and Treatment Board created a new model policy for law enforcement investigations in sexual assault cases. They brought together expertise from psychology, social work and criminal justice to suggest the best ways to approach sexual assault investigations, and to tackle some of those rape myths and stereotypes. That protocol was released in early 2015.
So do you feel you've seen a big change, then?
The training and the model policies that are being put out reflect the best of what we know from the current research, so I'm very optimistic that we are starting to see some changes in frontline practice.
