Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch received a letter from a woman who explained she had been brutally gang raped by strangers in an abandoned lot in Tulsa in 1971, when she was 12 years old. Though she had been literally torn open by the assault, she wrote that “the trauma of the event was nothing compared to the trauma she received afterwards at the hands of police.” The policewoman she spoke to the next day yelled at her, called her a “little slut” and blamed her for upsetting her mother. After 43 years, the survivor wrote, she hardly thinks about the rape, but the policewoman’s words “still echo in my ears from time to time, often when I least expect it. It brings me to tears.”
It would be nice to think that over the intervening 43 years, the Tulsa Police Department’s attitude toward sexual assault had evolved. Unfortunately, there are indications that problems still exist. News broke recently that 3,783 untested sexual assault forensic exams (often called “rape kits”) dating from 1989 to 2011, remain in Tulsa’s police storage facilities, unexamined. Obtaining evidence from a victim for a rape kit can take up to six hours, during which a certified nurse combs the body for evidence: bruises, cuts, abrasions, blood, semen, and vaginal fluid are all photographed, swabbed, and sent off for DNA testing. It is a grueling process, particularly after a trauma, but victims often bear it with the hope that the exam will yield evidence that will help bring their perpetrator to justice.
Often it does. National studies have shown that cases in which rape kits were tested were more likely to lead to arrests, and the clearing of backlogs in numerous cities has led to prosecutions and the solving of many cold cases. In Detroit in 2009, the testing of 2000 untested rape kits led to the identification of 127 serial rapists.
And yet, throughout the United States, police detectives often decide not to send kits to a lab for testing. Why? As Human Rights Watch has documented in Illinois and elsewhere, significant backlogs are often a symptom of a larger problem inside police departments -- a failure to take rape cases seriously. Police may decide at the time a victim makes a report that they don’t believe the victim or that a case doesn’t seem worth investigating. The skepticism persists despite multiple studies showing that only 2 to 8 percent of rape reports are false, a rate comparable to that for other crimes. Take the recent case of New Orleans, where between 2011 and 2013 police followed up on only 14 percent of reported sexual assault cases. As the Tulsa survivor’s story shows, when police don’t believe victims, victims suffer greatly. The community suffers too as perpetrators are left at large, free to commit further crimes.
There are other discouraging signs from the Tulsa police. The survivor who wrote us has tried repeatedly over the years to get her case records from police in order to have some closure, but withtout success. And Human Rights Watch’s repeated attempts in recent months to intervene with police on her behalf were met with a one-sentence form letter. The discovery of close to 4,000 rape kits in Tulsa police storage in the meantime has left us to wonder if there are thousands of other sexual assault victims who were needlessly traumatized, or at best ignored, when they reported their assaults to the police and will be haunted by their experience years later. We hope the recent revelations will inspire Tulsa police to take a closer look at their practice and ensure all victims, past and future, are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Samantha Reiser is an associate with the US program of Human Rights Watch.
