Reunion Online

With its $35 million investment, the New York District Attorney’s Office will help communities achieve the results that rape kit testing has shown to bring time and time again: safety, justice and healing.

Today, The Accountability Project, an initiative of our ENDTHEBACKLOG program, released our first findings about the extent of the backlog in four cities—Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Seattle and Tulsa.

Over the past several weeks, the colors of the ENDTHEBACKLOG.org map, which demonstrates everything we currently know about the rape kit backlog nationwide, have been changing.

ENDTHEBACKLOG.org, Joyful Heart's website devoted to shining a light on and ending this injustice, has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Activism website, one of the most prestigious honors a website can achieve.

It was middle school. I was playing a game in my head, scrambling letters of words to make other words. I thought of “grape” and all the words I could make using it: ape, pea, are, rap, peg. “What about rape?” I thought to myself. "Is that a word?" I asked my friend’s mom, my ride home that day, and her face immediately turned red. She said to never use it again. It was a “bad word.”

This Valentine’s Day, we ask you to start this conversation about domestic violence and healthy relationships in whatever way you can.

Since we’ve relaunched ENDTHEBACKLOG.org, news has been pouring in about the rape kit backlog across the country. Journalists are uncovering backlogs, jurisdictions are implementing reforms to track and test rape kits and citizens are taking action.

“There is nothing to be scared of because the worst part already happened,” says Miss World 1998, Linor Abargil, in the new documentary Brave Miss World. Abargil is referencing the life-altering event that happened a mere six weeks before she was crowned.

We're proud to share the new www.ENDTHEBACKLOG.org, our website dedicated to shining a light on and ending the rape kit backlog—hundreds of thousands of rape kits collected in the aftermath of a sexual assault, sitting untested in police and crime lab storage facilities.

This month, both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate advanced spending bills that include $117 million in grants that would help states and local governments to test backlogged DNA samples. We must tell our representatives to make this funding a priority.