Editorial By Sarah Tofte - Clearing DNA backlogs should prioritize rape kit testing

Every two minutes, someone is raped in the United States. Every year, more than 200,000 rape victims, mostly women, report their rapes to police.

Most consent to the creation of a rape kit, an invasive process for collecting physical evidence (including DNA material) of the assault that can take up to six hours. What most victims don't know is that in thousands of cases, that evidence sits untested in police evidence lockers.

The backlog of untested evidence gained national attention in 2001 when Debbie Smith, a rape victim, testified before Congress. The Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program was started in 2004 with the goal of processing the nearly 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide.

But the program has been expanded to allow states to test backlogged DNA evidence from any crime. Even as the proportion of rape victims who report their assaults is increasing, the processing of rape evidence is still backlogged - and the arrest rate of rapists is decreasing.

If Congress is serious about eliminating this backlog, lawmakers should amend the reauthorization bill to prioritize the testing of rape kits.Rape kits can help identify unknown assailants by matching DNA profiles obtained from evidence to profiles in the FBI's national DNA database. The kits can confirm the presence of a known suspect's DNA, corroborate a victim's version of events or exonerate innocent suspects.

Most states are not required to notify victims if their evidence has not been tested, so people usually have no idea whether their kits have been processed. Many victims assume that silence from the police means that their kit did not yield helpful information.

Over the past four years, Congress has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for states to conduct DNA testing on evidence from rape crime scenes.

But in reports to the Justice Department from 2005 to 2007, half the states receiving grants indicated that they were not spending all the money, and those that were did not indicate whether they were prioritizing backlogged rape kits.

States are not required to specify how many rape kits they process, and most reports say only how much DNA evidence was tested. Thus, evidence from homicides and other violent nonsexual crimes is regularly processed, while rape kits remain untested.

Congress should require states that receive grants to use at least 30 percent of the money to pay for testing backlogged rape kits. This is the least we can do for rape victims who submit to invasive exams in the hope of bringing their assailants to justice.

Sarah Tofte is a researcher at Human Rights Watch.