The Joyful Heart Foundation’s End The Backlog initiative has become one of the foremost authorities on rape kit backlog in the United States. Since 2010, we have worked tirelessly to shine a light on the horrific truth that when victims of sexual assault undergo the often traumatic experience of submitting the collection of evidence from their own body in the form of a rape kit, the resulting kit is often left untouched and untested for years and sometimes even decades.
At the inception of the End the Backlog initiative, we created the six pillars of rape kit reform: the gold standard for reform that could be used by legislators as goalposts in their efforts to end their backlogs and establish systems and protocols that make sure it never happen again.
Since then, we have helped legislators in all fifty states create over 110 laws, based on our six pillars of rape kit reform. However, our work has only just begun. Though many of these laws make great strides in rape kit reform, we have found that sometimes certain organizational and verbiage flaws cause loopholes that do not serve survivors or law enforcement and end up leaving offenders on the streets.
Upon the discovery of these loopholes, the team at the Joyful Heart Foundation investigates these flaws through numerous records requests and follow-ups, holding legislators and stakeholders to account and ensuring that these bills are making the intended impact on survivors and their communities.
Case study: Massachusetts
In 2018, Massachusetts legislators enacted S2371 which mandates the submission of all backlogged kits and calls for statewide inventory of unsubmitted rape kits with a report due annually on or before September 1st, among other things. However, the language of the legislation unintentionally excluded the vast majority of untested kits from the S2371’s requirements, as we uncovered after sending public records requests to the state lab.
In 2019, the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security reported finding 387 untested rape kits across Massachusetts, with only 87 out of more than 400 law enforcement agencies reporting. The lack of participation in the inventory and a number we knew, based on our experience, had to be way too low, led us to act.
To uncover the true extent of the backlog in Massachusetts, Joyful Heart issued public records requests to 15 police departments in the largest cities in the state and the State Police Crime Laboratory as part of The Accountability Project. Only seven of these jurisdictions responded to our public records requests with data. The lab provided reports showing numerous cases of untested kits, without stating the exact number of kits or reasons as to why these kits were untested.
In 2020, local investigative journalists from WCVB also sent a public records request to the state lab, uncovering more than 6,300 untested kits that were previously and over time submitted by law enforcement agencies. By only calling for testing of previously unsubmitted kits, Joyful Heart Foundation found that more than 6,300 rape kits that were submitted to labs by law enforcement, but subsequently not tested, were outside the scope of the mandate to test kits and are sitting at MSP gathering dust.
In the 2021 legislative session, legislators from both the state House and Senate adopted amendments to the state budget to address this issue. While both amendments had good intentions, the House amendment was more comprehensive. Thus, The Joyful Heart Foundation pushed for this amendment to be adopted over the Senate’s version. Eventually, the House amendment prevailed. However, shortly after, the governor issued a letter asserting concerns that some kits will be tested that cannot be under state law (when a kit has so little DNA that testing will consume all of it). In addition, he cited issues with the deadline for testing and eliminated a provision that required reporting on the testing progress by the state lab. Joyful Heart worked quickly with Rep. Higgins and leadership to push back on these changes and after some back and forth between representatives, senators, and the governor, final language was agreed on to resolve the matter, House Bill 4013. This is a comprehensive piece of legislation which mandates the testing of previously untested kits within 180 days of enactment. The law also includes an inventory mandate, which requires a report on the amount of untested kits in the lab’s possession, the year each kit was collected, the year each kit was tested, and the date the information was updated into CODIS.
Behind every kit is a survivor waiting for justice, and with the passage of HB4013, and bills similar to it, states are moving towards a justice system that signals to survivors they, and what happened to them, matters. The Joyful Heart Foundation and the End the Backlog initiative have spent over a decade advocating for the healing and the rights of survivors throughout the United States, and we are not slowing down anytime soon — if anything we are ramping up. We know these laws are only as useful as the people they affect which is why End the Backlog will always investigate how backlog-related laws are working and push for compliance. Together we can end this violence⏤and the backlog⏤forever.