Testing Sexual Assault Kits Is Not Always a Path to Justice
In the early 2010s, a wave of news stories described an unthinkable horror to many hundreds of thousands of untested sexual assault kits sitting on shelves while the alleged perpetrators of those assaults walked free. Sexual assault kits had either been destroyed by police departments, ruined by inappropriate storage, or were just languishing on shelves in police evidence rooms.
It was enraging. The hubris of police and prosecutors ignoring the pain of hundreds of thousands of people who had taken the difficult step of having a sexual assault kit collected was hard to digest.
As a result of that reporting and the pressure that followed, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance created the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) in 2015 to clear as many of those kits as quickly as possible.
The idea was that once the hundreds of thousands of old sexual assault kits are cleared, there should never be a backlog again. SAKI also provides law enforcement officers dealing with victims of sexual assault with trauma-informed training to help them work with victims. And the initiative helps law enforcement update investigative methods for dealing with sexual assault crimes and kits.
