February 25, 2014
Lawmakers in a number of US states are pushing legislation that aims to force officials to begin testing tens of thousands of rape kits that contain evidence against sexual predators who committed their crimes years ago, and in one case three decades.
Countless victims across the US have spent years pleading with local law enforcement and regional representatives to begin examining the backlog of rape kits, which could contain the DNA of a rape suspect still at large.
Whenever a woman is assaulted she is encouraged to undergo an examination in which medical personnel use swabs to collect fluids from throughout a woman’s body and preserve a variety of clothing and physical samples. That evidence, if analyzed promptly, is then used to help identify a rapist and potentially as evidence during a trial.
The New York-based Rape Kit Action Project has discovered that the testing of rape kits has become such a slow process that nearly 20 states have pending legislation that would speed up the process. The strictness of the laws vary from forcing authorities to inventory the rape kits they receive to forcing police to test them within a certain amount of time.
While three states have passed legislation mandating a statewide accounting of untested rape kits, the Associated Press reported that Tennessee is one of at least 17 others seeking to pass similar laws.
An estimated 12,000 rape kits have gone untested in Tennessee, dating back more than 20 years. Memphis rape victim Meaghan Ybos was attacked in 2003 and endured a collection of evidence from her body but her rapist was never identified. She was watching the news in 2012 when she heard a broadcast of an incident eerily similar to her own.
“I just knew it was the same person,” she said. Ybos called the police after hearing about the 2012 attack, at which point the authorities found it was the same rapist. “They never tried to process it until I called…and asked them,” she said of her own rape kit.