Nonprofit Quarterly

Taiwana lived in Flint, Michigan, in 1996, in a home her grandparents had passed down through her family. She was in that home with six of her seven children when her rapist attacked.

Although she reported her attacker and got a rape kit, her case was not pursued for over two decades. Tens of thousands of people have had an experience like Taiwana’s. The Joyful Heart Foundation (JHF) is leading a national effort to end this pattern.

The Joyful Heart Foundation’s Accountability Project, an initiative that’s part of the #EndTheBacklog program focused on identifying the extent of the national rape kit backlog, has released new information detailing the number of untested kits in several cities nationwide.

Through public record requests, the foundation discovered the following totals:

Charlotte, North Carolina: 1,019 untested kits

Jacksonville, Florida: 1,943 kits

Kansas City, Missouri: 1,324 kits

Portland, Oregon: 1,931 kits

San Diego, California: 2,873 kits

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For anyone who has worked on issues of violence against women, this should serve as a wake-up call that the work is far from done. For anyone who works on social change, it serves as a reminder that monitoring implementation of hard-won laws is critical.