Reunion Online

Lawmakers have allocated $41 million to help rape victims as part of the $1.1 trillion spending plan approved by Congress Thursday night.

The San Francisco Police Department announced this week that it has cleared a backlog of sexual assault kits dating back more than 10 years.

Advocates praised the inclusion of $41 million to handle thousands of untested rape kits.

The massive national backlog of rape kits is being targeted by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr. According to Vance, there is a backlog of “hundreds of thousands of rape kits” across the country in police warehouses.

The Seattle Police Department's records show that in a little over a decade, 1,641 rape kits were booked into evidence. But only 365 of kits were tested, just 22% of the total.

Under the program announced in New York, $35 million in civil forfeiture assets will be made available to localities and states across the country to test some 70,000 rape kits, which are a collection of physical evidence painstakingly taken from victims of sexual assault.

Last year, a FedEx delivery truck arrived at the Detroit Police Department storage facility to pick up the first batch of untested rape kits bound, finally, for crime labs. Thus began Detroit’s massive task of processing its rape kit backlog – the more than 11,000 kits that were left behind to languish in a police warehouse, some for more than two decades.