Processed Rape Kits Send Important Message to Survivors
For far too long, our society has placed the burden of proof in sexual assault cases on the survivor, with police aggressively questioning survivors’ stories or, at worst, failing to even bother with asking questions and dismissing the accusations outright. That kind of attitude led to thousands of those rape kits ending up in a Detroit storage room instead of being sent to a forensic lab for analysis.
The Detroit office of Bridge Magazine recently reported that Wayne County had recently completed a review of 11,137 of 11,341 untested forensic evidence kits collected in reported rape cases (often referred to as a “rape kit”). Based on that review, 4,029 investigations had been closed and 224 convictions, sometimes convicting a single perpetrator of multiple rapes.
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