A New System to Ensure Sexual-Assault Cases Aren’t Forgotten
Susan Baisch has been conducting sexual-assault forensic exams for more than 27 years. Working as an emergency-room nurse for St. Luke’s hospital in Twin Falls, Idaho, Baisch has been specially trained to collect sexual-assault evidence in what are known as “rape kits.” The exam can be long and invasive, lasting four to six hours.
After assaults are reported, survivors’ bodies are treated like crime scenes and, if they so choose, searched, swabbed, and photographed, along with their clothes and other personal belongings, to find possible DNA evidence left by an attacker. Whatever evidence is found is then sealed in a sexual-assault evidence kit. The DNA can often be a crucial tool in prosecuting sexual assault. But that requires the kits to be tested by a police crime lab. Before 2016, forensic nurses didn’t always know what happened to the kits after they left their custody.
“We never really knew how many kits we had,” Baisch told me. She recalled that she would say to the police or the crime lab,“‘We sent you 10 last week—what happened to them?’” They didn’t always have an answer. And if the lab didn’t know, and the police didn’t know, and Baisch didn’t know, then the survivors themselves didn’t know.
[Read: Rapists go free while rape kits go untested ]
Where did the kits by the found that from 2010 to 2015, Twin Falls Police submitted only 23 percent of kits for testing. About 140 miles or so northwest of Twin Falls, in Nampa, only 10 percent of kits were submitted. This practice was not specific to Idaho. The Joyful Heart Foundation, an anti-sexual-violence nonprofit founded by the actress Mariska Hargitay, estimates that hundreds of thousands of sexual-assault kits are currently sitting untested in crime labs or police evidence rooms across the United States.
