About End the Backlog

End the Backlog is a program of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national nonprofit organization founded by producer, director, actress, and advocate Mariska Hargitay with the mission to transform society’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse; support survivors’ healing; and end this violence forever.

The effort to End the Backlog is the cornerstone of Joyful Heart’s policy and advocacy work. We focus on shining a light on the rape kit backlog in the United States. Our goal is to end this injustice by identifying the extent of the nation’s backlog and best practices for eliminating it. We do this by expanding the national dialogue on rape kit testing through increased public awareness, sharing groundbreaking research, engaging communities and government agencies and officials, and advocating for comprehensive rape kit reform legislation and policies based on our six pillars of reform. Ultimately, we seek to change attitudes about sexual violence and abuse, educate the public, improve systems to lessen the trauma survivors experience, and ensure greater access to justice for survivors.

Kym Worthy alongside Mariska Hargitay at the National Press Club.

Joyful Heart now provides us with expertise, guidance, and a national perspective. They are helping to find ways to secure the funds needed to test the remaining kits and ensuring that all efforts to end this atrocity, including the creation of a victim notification process, remain victim-centered.

Kym Worthy, Wayne County Prosecutor

Led by staff and board members who are national experts on the rape kit backlog, Joyful Heart works to identify jurisdictions with rape kit backlogs and to assist them with developing and implementing survivor-centered reforms. As they move forward with clearing their backlogs, we provide guidance and expertise on best practices, such as how to re-engage survivors whose kits have gone untested for years or even decades, a process called victim notification. Through our ongoing research and public records requests, we make information available on where backlogs exist and how jurisdictions have improved their rape kit testing policies. We work to ensure that survivors and their experiences are at the center of all reforms.